Super Mario Kart

Possibly the most fun racer on the console

Hi Kids, do you like driving? What do you meant "yes" you're not old enough. For those that wanted to drive and like the idea of driving but weren't specifically old enough to do it, there was Go-Karting. A wondrously fun little activity of driving around a track on a seat close enough to scrap your arse-flesh off if it was any close to the ground while replacement lawnmower engines turned wheels and let kids experience the "high speed" thrills of driving into walls. Thankfully Super Mario Kart on the SNES is a lot more fun and not just because I get to throw things other than bricks at people, again.

Your Roster: Pratt and brother, the annoying accelerators, the fatties and the extras

THE Kart racing game of the 16bit era and THE Kart racing franchise that has helped keep Nintendo afloat for a while by re-inventing the same game into new versions for the upcoming consoles that Nintendo have never done before or does with any other franchise it has (Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, Metroid... Seriously, how many times must I walk up and find a missile, or a flower or catch another fucking Pikachu...).

You win the small cup. Now man-up and go for a bigger race.

But enough digging commentary for the moment (it's only ever for the moment) what we have here is a grand scope of a game made possible by the use and clever implementation of Mode 7 on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Mode 7 being a specific function that allowed for the rapid and quick movement and re-drawing of sprites to scale, stretching and rotating that wasn't feasible before on the NES. Thanks to this, we get large colourful tracks that move fairly fluidly around the character sprite while we trundle along on the little wheels trying to pick up coins, powerups and ultimate bash the hell out of our enemies.

Lava lava everywhere and all of it is... mildly annoying.

The game has a starting line up of 8 characters to choose from. In that with most racing games there will be this little thing of having fast cars with slow acceleration, slow cars with fast acceleration, all-rounder cars and "something a bit either side of the all rounder if you want to be really fucking picky with" cars. You've Mario and Luigi as the all-rounders, Donkey Kong Jr and Bowser for the fast with slow acceleration cars, Peach and Yoshi for the quicker acceleration and finally Toad and KoopaTroopa for the extra little specification, which was previously listed.

A huge number one to obnoxiously proclaim your victory, probably more so than the player would.

During your races you'll be able to collect up to 10 coins to help boost your stats and lose them each time you fall off the track, drive into lava, drown, get hit by weapons and so on and forth though if you know the racing line well enough, it'll not be an issue. You'll also be able to collect multiple weapons ranging from the green shell which fires straight and bounces around, the red shell which is your heat seeking variety of shell, bananas to drop to the ground and let others run into it, stars which boost all stats to 10 and make you invincible to everything barring falling off the course, 2 extra coins (whoo...), mushrooms to boost your speed across even rough terrain and improvise shortcuts, ghosts to steal other items while making you ethereal, feathers to jump over items and walls for more shortcuts and the lightning bolt which shrinks everyone else and lets you run them over.

Quite a lot.

If you're being attacked, you get the mildly obscured "rear view" which MIGHT help you.

However, this being the first days of Kart gaming for Nintendo, the AI isn't quite as "human" as one might hope for or even expect. Weapons are pre-designated for specific characters and fire/use them in different ways than you can in most cases. For example, Bowser has a fireball that moves back and forth on the track, you don't. Mario and Luigi as AI can use invincibility stars when they choose, you can't. Peach and Toad drop/throw mushrooms that shrink you, you can't do that either. Yoshi hurls eggs, you can't even get them. But then none of them can use the lightning bolt or use boosters across heavy terrain, or feathers to get around corners/walls. Though having said that, they can run over items and use them as ramps rather than getting hit.

Solo time trial. For the gamer that REALLY plays alone.

Another odd instance is that, apart from the starting line-up, all the AI will race along the exact same racing line bar a few movements here and there. There is very VERY little deviation from one racer to the next in how they navigate the track. Which means that the items you drop MUST be carefully placed, but if you can always drop them in that place, you've a powerful advantage (or you get hit by your own stuff). The AI also manages to keep track with you despite how fast you can go for the most part. Though is some levels there are so many chevron speed boosts that a decent player can lap every single other cart (meaning you beat the 3 laps before the carts manage to do 2).

Without doubt, the most fun part of the game by far.

There's lots of choice within the game, you've 20 different tracks for a start, 4 different cups to race through and multiple engine sizes from 50cc to 150cc which gives a higher/faster challenge with more aggressive AI opponents, which the last set of tracks are notoriously difficult and have the deadly Rainbow Road, which means you've got to keep on the track fully as there's no walls to bounce off and the Thwomps are invincible (though the AI drives through them). However, it's early days and the fact there's so many different tracks leaves the single (and 2 player) Grand Prix mode with a lot of potential and hope.

If only that was all the game had.

You will be punished heavily if hit by something when 3-4 cars over take you on a single mistake

There's also the VS mode where 2 players race head to head on a track of their choosing. No other AI around it's just player 1 and player 2 gunning their engines and slowly trundling off before speed boosts and power ups begin to break up the pace of the level. Or use it as a chance to exploit cheats, explore shortcuts and generally take a less intense race at the game. But that's not the cream of the crop for this game.

That's the battle mode.

3 lives, that's it. Winner stays in, loser sits in the corner.

Simple, pure, fun. How best I can describe it. You've yourself, your friend/enemy in 1 of 4 tracks designed symmetrically (some of which are quite large) and a 3 balloons. If you take a hit, you lose a balloon and after a while the power ups replenish and the weapons becomes more regularly found and fired. You don't get the lightning bolt either but since the focus will be mostly on weapons like green and red shells, you're either playing ricochet with the bouncing green shells or you're trying to bank shots around corners after your opponent with the curving movements of the red shells.

If you've a feather (or enough speed) you can jump the gap for the shorcut. Or fall.

It's fast, it's frantic and it's fun when two players know the level, can power slide around corners and generally are very capable drivers for a fun (relatively) simple game. Even this mode on its own is wonderful as it is, at times it feels like this is the whole point of Mario Kart and that the Grand Prix and AI racers are a tacked on bonus to what is a fun way to duel each other to do the deflation.

Monopoly C64

The board shown, the players ready, the boredom can begin!

 

It's that family gathering time, when you've got several people around, you've got full stomachs and there nothing on TV that nobody really wants to watch. Then someone, with usually the best intentions, thinks of playing the most dreaded of social activities, the board game. So now you're stuck reading the rules for the first half an hour, those too drunk to play properly will be messing about and trying to shove the playing dice up their nose and everyone else keeps looking at their watches and trying to make an excuse to go home.

And one prick always takes it far too seriously and always somehow has a dictionary on hand to spell all those 2 letter words while another person plays ONLY by their deviant rules. So to celebrate this bullshittery, I'm reviewing Monopoly on C64. You may hate me later, or now, I don't really care either way.

At least the names are accurate for the players.

There's a distinct advantage to having a board game on a computer. You never lose the Old Kent Road down the back of the couch, or find the missing hotel with your bare feet sometime later that week causing you to curse the day that someone decided that injection plastic moulding was a good idea.

You've your usual 6 player maximum in this game, you can also start the short game where several properties are divvied up and given to players while you could also go in for the long haul. Dice rolling takes place first of all to decide who goes first, then the game begins properly with the order ordained by chance itself and it's then a race to buy up stuff and make other people give you their hard(maybe) won money when they accidentally roll a random outcome that lands on your stuff.

Auctions usually are high octane, cash vs thrill, places of excitement. Nobody thought to include that in this game.

Each player starts with £1500 and can move around the board after rolling two die, upon landing on a property they can purchase it if there's enough funds in their account (if they want to) or they can witness it going up for auction with the other players (and themselves included) where the bidding can become really stupid or low level.

If money becomes a problem, they can mortgage their properties and gain cash back from that but they lose the chance to gain rent from their possessions until they pay 110% of the price again. If a player cannot pay off a debt, they go bankrupt and are out of the game.

While moving around the board, players can land on Chance and Community Chest where various events will take place that can either help or hinder the player, or do nothing at all such as the "Pay for repairs on houses" if they own no houses at that point.

Nobody likes Dave enough to give him a nickname.

That's the general gist of the game, the C64 version managed to replicate this rather well. The board is clearly visible at all times, characters and colours of all things can be changed to suit the players however they deem necessary. So if they don't want a black car, they can change it to anything at all, even the colour of the board to just REALLY confuse things. The screen also shows where they are on a zoomed in view of the game while also showing the next 3 spaces so they can see the lay of the land in a closer point. Credit and Assets are easily viewable at all times but pressing the corresponding key to view them, as is for showing who owns what. Collection of rent is optional, as long as someone presses R to collect rent otherwise it's ignored though the AI NEVER forgets to.

It's when the game gets into things like trading and such that the pace of it all slows to a crawl. The menu is slow already on the C64 and moving around and checking things can be time consuming for the human players while AI can make the same offer EVERY SINGLE TURN until they get what they want to have. Usually they'll never settle if someone's going to gain a full set unless you pay roughly double the value so there's little way to trade things or play favourites.

Whoo, people have bought things. Hooray. Why am I putting myself through this?

Likewise the game grinds to a halt when it comes down to avoid bankruptcy and the players are usually too fed up to carry on playing

The game does have snippets of sound, dice rolling makes a noise not too dissimilar to a dice rolling. Train stations sound a little like a steam engine making some noise, being sent to jail (directly to jail, do not pass go) gives you a wonderfully wailing siren noise but no due process for being told of the crime committed and so on. Which doesn't help the game at all, being that it's rather slow in the first place, when it gets bogged down with extra things and issues that aren't helping the flow or pace of the game, it's easy to get fed up with the system and decide that once one person hits the idea of bankruptcy, that it's time to switch off and play something else.

Bitchtit bought a station, I can barely contain myself.

Something fun. Because this is clearly not it. The real shame is that I cannot pick the board up and smack someone over the head with it, and the C64 keyboard combo runs the risk of me actually breaking the machine. So that's not an option.

Board games on computers are usually not a good idea unless it's developed JUST for the computer in the first place or is a play-by-post game. 

The button to switch the whole thing, will never be far from your mind.

Unreal

Few games were ever so ambitious as EpicMegaGames (now just Epic... a rather modest title) and their attempt with Unreal. A wide open series of expansive levels, gorgeous scenery, various races of enemies, native creatures and a sprawling planet wide enslavement force that you just so happen of which to be caught up in the middle from the peaceful emaciated and pseudo aboriginal/ethinic-minority aliens and the techno advanced oppressors with their larger, faster, deadlier, creatures and weaponised technology.

You play as Captain McNoFace, a generic 100 hit point wonder with a background of pointlessness and has key useful skills in moving and using weapons, crash landing his way on a prison ship into an odd gravitational field of a planet and wake up on your cell floor as the only survivor of the ship. After a rather atmospheric and dark exploratory check around the wreckage, grab yourself a gun, escape from the shadowy INHUMAN thingies and step outside into the bright world of Unreal while your jaw hits the floor at the sheer size and scope of the first outdoor arena being larger than anything most games bothered to even make in their entirety. Yes, Unreal is an epically large game, particularly for its time.

As FuckHead McNoBrain, you will travel here, there and everywhere trying to get back off the planet by scouting mines, enemy ships, other human ships that crashed nearby (read: fucking miles away, as in, half the game away), sky lands, mother ships and final bosses sat right beside the highest point of escape, the pod.  On the way you'll encounter a myriad of helpful aliens (try not to shoot them, it makes them less amenable to your cause), guns of all shapes and sizes from a gem-shooter that fires like a machinegun or shotgun depending on your alt-fire. Miniguns (compulsory in 90's shooters) multi-load rockets, explosive grenades, 1-2-combo laser cannons, sniper rifles (pop those heads off) and a bogey gun with explosive bogies. I wish I was making that last one up, though it's called a different name and lets you fire rapid pulses of explosives bogies or charge up to hock a fat sticky mucus ball that slides down a bit on walls before detonating into lots of bogies.

Story/plot is told through a translator GUI that beeps when you walk past the relevant message prompting box to get you look and read the events occurring around you, much like Marathon did with its view screen/terminals. Each one will likely give you helpful information on your objective or some developing lore regarding the game's plot and such.

While it all sounds nice and pretty, get ready. Each enemy within the game acts like a death match bot, perhaps rather fitting and preparing for the later instalments of Unreal Tournament series, but every enemy will try to side-step, dodge, flank, use the level around themselves to hide, take cover, attack from vantage points and such. Most notably the predator-esque creatures that have claws on their wrists and fire energy balls, seen to be diving and dodging like mad-things much in the same way the player can (and should).

From huge fat lumps with rocket launchers, to the Predator guys, to suited and booted alien marines with lasers and grenades to the flying demon monstrosities, every creature is carefully sculpted and crafted to be physically unique and identifiable, yet seems to adhere to the same movement rules as the player, except the titans which act as the games "oooh fuck" element whenever you encounter one. (and as an "ah shit" when you meet two at once).

With such a size and scope, this game seems and feels empty at times. There's the occasional hut and so here and there, castles and outposts, a village at one point, but with so few people and enemies occupying the game (until the bigger battles at least) the sparse landscape and it's pretty appearance, are very devoid of life, perhaps as a limitation on the engine at the time or being traded for the processing power of the large scale maps and carefully intricate details. It just feels empty, even back in the day of playing the game.

Though when I say that the game is huge, you really do get the feel of being on a massive (if a little linear) planet, travelling across wastelands, lush meadows, canyons and caves, climbing towers to find sky-lifts into airborne towns, battling through giant spaceships and destroying power sources to enjoy pitch-black levels that atmospherically incorporate the flashlight into the fray. That said however, sometimes the game is TOO big and level design can leave a player very disorientated and confused, particularly in the more dungeon based levels where backtracking is expected and does occur. It can leave a player rather daunted as to where to go next and whether or not they've hit the right switches to open the levels up and unlock essential doors.

The controls of the game are the much used 8 way direction, mouse look, fire and alt fire, while using inventory spaces and extra navigation for items and extra buttons for using such items or bringing up details like the translator, it can take a little while to get used to where to use things and being in an intense and fast paced battle, mean the difference in winning and reloading with annoyance. Oddly, there's a dodge system in the movements, allowing players to spring in one of 4 directions to avoid attacks, which is great when fighting in an open landscape but a cause of death if trying to navigate narrow walkways and double tapping a direction sends you FLYING off the fucking edge into lava.

Bit of a balls up there.

Graphically the game is gorgeous, there's no doubt on that account, sound-wise the game sports a rich host of fine effects and audio garble from the inhuman creatures, though sounding more like foreign speak than something truly alien in presentation. The musical accompaniment never really gets beyond being a background ambience, the occasional pseudo-techno tracks during high speed/action areas which doesn't stop once you'll killed everything, can kill the atmosphere and plunge it into the shadowy, stinky recesses of dullness.

The unfortunate part of the game, is that you won't meet another character that helpfully explains the plot, or tells you why not to shoot everything, or where to go next, it's done entirely through finding the relevant hieroglyphs and in some cases, deciphering the details to ascertain where upon one might find the next snippet of plot or direction. Further confusion being raised when one is told to power something up (hit a switch) or depower something (hit another switch) with no indication on the location of the button or what it even looks like, which results in some awkward trial and error game play mechanics. Some piss-poor level design allows for you to jump ahead to a button or switch you WILL have to push but not yet, to be told "not yet" in far more descriptive terms with no real guidance on where the switch you NEED to press now is currently located.

But what is Unreal, ultimately? An experience more so than a game, it's an adventure into the alien architecture of unreality (geddit?) and the fruits of labour of some visionary individuals, culminating in a slightly off-centre aim leaving an audience with its breath-taken one moment and frustrated in the next.

I still don't get why the last boss would be so close to the escape pod that it cannot fit inside...

PC S.T.A.L.K.E.R

"My Ideal Holiday" by Bodster. Thousands of square miles of overgrown, unkempt, woodland; cities and villages turned ghost towns by the lack of involvement of humanity for at least 30 years; a military presence to execute interlopers on sight; wild and chaotic, sometimes psychic, monsters and mutants; helicopter patrols primed and ready to fire at a moment’s notice; obscure random events liable to kill people at a moment’s notice often unseen to the untrained eye; a blown out nuclear reactor that is working once again.

Yep, I want to be a STALKER.

There was much hype built up around this game "Shadows of Chernobyl" for a game set in and around Chernobyl and Pripyat, mapped and modelled after the real locations and having suffered much of the events of the location but also tying in with an relatively obscure piece of fiction at the time, Roadside Picnic, which I heartily recommend to any avid science-fiction fan looking for a short story.

Plot wise, you are Mr Memory Loss (so obviously you're a fuck up somewhere along the lines, why people can't just be Captain Bland, I'll never know) who has awoken with a burned tattoo on his arm earning the nick name Marked One like it's the biggest and cleverest joke of the century, given the local population, it's understandable. After a brief "What you got no memory? Go do X, Y and Z to learn the layouts and I'll tell you what I remember" sets you up for the big events in the game and readies you in getting and gathering weapons, scavenging in buildings, avoiding radiation zones and the infamous anomalies.

Or... it would have done. But I'll rip into that later.

Your amnesiac self has to travel the "Zone" a cordoned off military are around the Chernobyl Reactor to stop people getting close and meeting death from the anomalies. These being ghostly things that can travel the landscape and cause things and people to die suddenly, bloodily, excessively or cause horrific damage for no real reason. In the book they're described as being the remnants of a picnic left over from aliens (as a metaphor) and it's just the debris from their littering doing what it usually does. You however get to avoid the nasty ones, find items affected by the reactor's blowouts and trade them for bigger and better guns and items or keep them for the bonus factors they provide (Until someone gets smart and gets enough bullet protection to HEAL each time they get shot...nice one for working that out). While trying to do various things like not pissing off the local factions of fighters and survivors, raiding groups of glory hunters, mutants and monsters spread liberally around the countryside, finding out whom you were or trying to get into the reactor to find the grand prize.

That grand prize being a single wish, but the wish granter is a prick, so it'll back-fire hilariously. If you've ever seen Wish Master films, you'll know what I'm talking about. "I wish to no longer see this world in pain and suffering" Bye, bye, eyeballs. It's that kind of wish granting little bastard.

It takes the story from Roadside Picnic and combines it with the real world events that happened in Chernobyl, the anomalies and odd items in the zone, the STALKERS and scavengers that would aid people in finding and selling items while skipping military cordons but the story and film had a lot more suspense and potential than the game does in storytelling, but wouldn't make as much fun to be a game. The overall package however of the first STALKER game takes the more interesting aspects for action and story and combines them to create this game.

You'll travel from place to place, trade your items and weapons for other items and ammo, armour and the usual survival items like med kits, radiation cure and equipment to give you lights, grenade launchers and other such fun things. You'll explore derelict buildings avoiding traps and radiation in the cities and complexes while negating the military turning up to stop you here and there because as far as they're concerned, nobody should be making wishes as it can't be controlled so there's a nice little pro-anarchy notion for your political bullshit comparisons. You'll have to explore how to shut down defences to let you get closer to the big prize and suffer the hallucinations accompanying it while skipping back and forth and fighting almost every step of the way.

The physics engine is gorgeous, if a little clunky in places. Bullets punch through as far as they would through wood, metal and concrete so seeing a guy taking cover behind wood you can machinegun his body into a ragdoll through the barrier he's hidden behind. Bounce grenades off the walls nearby to land near him to flush him out or charge in with a double barrel shotgun and unload your pseudo-penis into his face. Breaking parts of buildings can cause other parts to topple and fall upon opponents and launching barrels via explosions into people to kill them is always rewarding to observe. The anomalies play with the physics even further by occasionally launching you into the air if you wander into one, dragging you into the sky and ripping you apart or electrocuting you with high damage shocks (or heal if you're immune to shocks and electrics).

The story is played through in finding PDAs of dead people you're sent to find or follow a path towards the main goal of working out whom you are and the truth behind the wish maker, which side of the conflict to take and ultimately determine whether to be a shitbag or a saint in the very obvious moral choice system of "nice guy" vs. "scumbagbastard guy". You can entertain yourself with various side quests to kill other STALKERs in the zone, hunt wildlife (and it's VERY wild in some places) beat the arbitrary arena fights that seem to litter free-roam games these days to become king-dong of the arena. There's little here that hasn't been done before in say other games but the stylish presentation and grotty feeling really sells the environment and emersion is... where it falls down.

Originally the game was going to be full roaming, huge area with exploration akin to Morrowind, Skyrim, fallout etc. Vehicles could be commandeered and driven, anomalies would be randomly moved around when blow outs happened (you get only one, it's scripted and you have to be indoors to survive radiation death day), other STALKERS could finish quests for you or even beat the game and make their own wishes. Most of this was scrapped and now you get key "areas" and upon reaching the end of such an area, you get "would you like to move on" and it RIPS you out of the story and game's immersive properties. That said, the game is fantastic at the setup of suspense and horror when scavenging inside the bigger installations and being attacked out of seemingly nowhere by creatures that turn invisible or can rip your consciousness from your mind and throw it back with psychic blasts. Moving around the towns and the city itself is sadly limited by the usual debris that blocks all doors and windows you could get inside had it not been there while hyper-powerful and super-armed enemies are hitting you with death from above, a little one-sided but knock one down and steal the gun for a BIG boost in your fight back.

The attention to detail is lavished lovingly in this game and it shows, even when running around the reactor buildings themselves in the final fights and being teleported through anomalies left and right while combating the same people that tried to sell you down the road with bullshit, gets intense in the final moments and feels more like a fulfilling payoff than the wish making itself (yep, those are bad endings). The final product is so trimmed down from what was originally promised and moved back from the grand ideas and story we were all sold, I can imagine that through the effort put in, the decision to do so couldn't have been taken lightly and would have been a huge blow the actual designers and programmers. You can feel the dedication in the game and the fact it's a fraction of what they wanted to deliver (and videos and demos show that there WAS those things in there) would have been soul destroying to have to do.

What STALKER falls down on is variation. You'll enter a new area, kill a few people, take their guns and ammo and trade off your older guns and ammo, and repeat this with each new area. Once the bigger more powerful guns come into play, you'll stick with those and load up on ammo, of which there is plenty, and keep running and gunning to find new items and scavenge further. There are a few different monsters in the game from large mutants, to stealthy ninja monsters that turn translucent, to psychic attacking gnome/dwarf things to dogs and blink dogs which generate fake dogs. In the bosses, there are a few more ethereal creatures but not all that many altogether. Humans range from military with high power guns and usually difficult to take on, scavengers with lower guns, clan members aligned with their respective groups that will have their own weapons, some will be armed in exosuits making them walking tanks most people will fear but still die from a headshot from event the crappiest pea-shooter. If you're accurate with a rifle and scope, no human enemy will be a threat. Add in a rocket launcher for yourself and it's easy street until sheer numbers MIGHT overwhelm you. Take your time and use cover and there's little challenge here at all.

That said, it's a good game with great potential that was sadly cut short either by meddling from the executives or skipped deadlines. I have heard that various mods can be installed for people to play the game closer to how it was originally envisioned but that takes a little trust on the part of others to deliver that and not to bollocks up your game in the process. Well worth a look however just to see how an apocalyptic survival game could and should be done.

I'd wish you to stop reading but likely my hands will fall off to stop anything else I write ever to be written aga...