Quartet 2 - Arcade

Let the poncy title games, begin!

For an old game there's a little bit of charm still left in this one. Quartet 2, in which we adopt the Gauntlet model of gaming and having several colour coded players running around the levels but instead we drop it to a 2D platformer, throw in some guns and weapons, some physical powerups and so on.

As opposed to a chicken, that would be original at least.

From the off, in Quartet 2, you get to choose from Caucasian guy 1, Caucasian guy 2, Caucasian Girl and Complimentary Black Guy, running by the names of Lee, Joe, Mary and Edgar and their photos looking like some offcut designs from the original Dragonball series of anime. I'm guessing this line up was done for the thinking "White Male most popular demographic so let's have two of those, then throw in some others 'just in case' someone wants to use them". Though having said that, they all do have slightly different weapons and slightly different weapons during upgrades.

Lots of enemies, lots of action and fairly smoothe too!

The premise is simple enough in Quartet 2, start the level, travel to the end and kill the boss that holds the key, then leave via the door. On the way you may find various power ups in the guise of jetpacks, higher jumping, more points, weapon upgrades and such. Also found within the levels are bouncing orbs that can be shot to cycle through colours, giving rise to the possibility of gaining weapon upgrades if you collect it with your characters main colour being selected, or just more points. However, upgrading your weapon too many times resets it back to the first point, which may or may not be a boon or hindrance depending upon your character, but gives you an incentive to hunt for more orbs.

Special weapons for each person, but who really cares?

However, you also have a limit on health and while the game plays, your health drops steadily. Getting hit, shot, or just collided with by the enemies will plummet your health to dangerously low levels and dropping to zero is the end game situation for your character unless you want to pump in another credit and keep playing.

Joe will win the day, with his stupid quiff

Given the time and technology available, Quartet 2 is proudly holding the "Cartoony" appearance because it really can't be doing anything else with such limited capacity. However you can expect the rooms and levels to be flooded with enemies from time to time with no slow-down happening in the game. Monsters, as cartoony as one can make them, spawn periodically and endlessly from key spawn doorways and trapdoors to hamper our characters progress while the boss will take multiple hits before going down, increasing in speed and threat until that point.

Mary in red, dancing with me... Cheek to cheek...

The sounds within Quartet 2 are quite chirpy and cheerful for the music, tripping along to an almost easy-going set of musical scores while the blippy noises and beepy squeakies give the game a certain charm that improves to the overall experience in that this is rather innocent little game before the times of blood, guts, gore and games taking that "dark" and "edgy" approach, it's cute and cheerful and for all intents and purposes could be a game show of the future.

It looks complicated, most of it can be ignored and just gun it for the key.

Overall, Quartet isn't a bad game but it's not a great game. There's too many times that you'll find your character dropping all of their items after colliding with an enemy (including the door key) and having to backtrack to get them and then dropping it again when you arrive back to the same enemy now that it has respawned and sits awaiting to fuck up your day the same way it already has done so. Give it a try however if you see it around, the responsive controls may let you feel for the days when playable games were all that a game really needed to be without relying on gimmicks and sexualisation.

Hot Rod - Arcade

There's some rods, they're hot.... Maybe...

Take a television and put in down so that the screen is facing up towards the ceiling. Then take 4 steering wheels and 4 pedals and you've basically got the right layout for this arcade racer. Throw in some colours for the cars, make the tracks increasingly difficult and ensure some short cuts for the cheekier players and you've got Hot Rod.

And nothing happened for ages, then a quick flash of something, then nothing.

The recipe here is perfect for the home console (wait for it...). You've got a top down view racer akin to the old Micro Machines games with similar functionality. Up to four players can race around a track, picking up points and gas in order to race over the finish line and gain more points which can then be spent on upgrades and boosts to the racing car. The grinding is paramount and after winning races, you'll get yourself more and more points in which to buy better things and become an almost unstoppable car. On the assumption you can actually DRIVE the car.

Shopping time!

As a racer, it's bright and bold and flashy, a rainbow spectrum of illustrative prowess brought by Sega here with clearly defined roads and layout, bonus pickups and nice little details in the background from people walking along roads to cattle wandering the countryside while you're driving through it like a bat out of hell. However, there lies a problem with this method of gaming.

On your marks, get set, don't blow your engine on the start line.

As mentioned above, actually driving the car can be a challenge. You're encouraged to floor the pedal and spin the wheel to corner, while there is also NO BRAKES. You can slow down gradually by releasing the pedal but there's no braking at all. So if you're going to lose control, you are GOING TO LOSE CONTROL and likely into a train, or against the wall and bump repeatedly against it while everyone else trundles happily along to the victory line.

You either won or paid enough money to see this shit.

Like the aforementioned Micro Machines, Hot Rod uses the same system of playing. In that it's one screen and whomever is found to be lagging behind (i.e. slipping off the screen) will be bumped to the middle of the screen and a significant amount of fuel will be confiscated as punishment. Do this enough times in a race and you'll be drained of all fuel and out of the game. Fuel pickups are not that numerous and you'll get 10 to 20 points worth each time, while winning a race will get you roughly 80 or so. Win enough races and the card girl gives you a kiss, aww isn't that cute. No.

Despite the image, it's actually quite a smooth game.

In the shop you can buy a whole host of items, from tyres to spoilers, wings and bumpers, engines and beyond. Cash is usually tight and you'll likely only get the change to have one upgrade or less (yes, none at all) when you visit the shop and not every item is available, it all depends upon which shop you go into. Sometimes your engine might blow up and you have to buy another, other times you'll have little clue as to what hazards will assail you in the next level and you'll be left guessing whether to buy the speed tyres, snow tyres, or radials in order to get the most of your control in the upcoming race.

Different tracks with different challenges, sometimes you'll get a clue at the shop.

That said, while the driving can be picky, tricky and finicky at the same time, there's also the fact that there are a LOT of levels in this game. If you can navigate around the tight corners, the horrible chicanes and the occasional traps like rock slides, avalanches, oncoming traffic and such, you might find it's a fun game to play but it does love to punish the unsuspecting player and punish them fiercely. If you can fund the time, it's an ok game, but far too expensive to really get into the meat of the gameplay and discover the marred gem of a game this is.

Wonderboy (Adventure Island)

Run right, throw axe, save girl. Simple.

Running from the left to the right and throwing something in the progression to get past the adversaries in the way and remove the obstructions they create, to attain several goals at once be it the eradication of the blight that has caused the situation in the first place that necessitates the running and/or rescue an individual of the opposite gender being held against their will in constraints unnecessary and illegal.

Yeah I just described most of the 80s arcades and home consoles games, but oh well.

The skateboard, added shield and speed.

Wonder boy, alternatively known as Adventure Island (NOT time is it?...) particularly on the home consoles until the RPG diversion took Adventure Island down the platforming route and the Wonder boy franchise/name off into the scrolling 2D battle RPG scheme of things. Wonder boy on the arcade is strictly the former of the two involving your plucky young hero 'Paedo-Bait McGrassSkirt' trying to save 'Miss NobodyInParticular' from the supposedly evil clutches of Some Guy that changes heads more often than he changes underwear.

It makes sense later, bear with me.

These lovely enemies will just pop up and slap you if you're not careful

 
It's present in a light-hearted and comical manner; everything looks so cutesy and appealing on that Technicolor level that almost looks like a psychedelic saccharine approach to creature and level design that if it was any more sugar coated; legs would be falling off and eyes bursting in fountains of spectral wonder. It's bright, colourful and looks like it belongs on some kids Saturday Morning TV show. (And maybe should be with some of the shit that's broadcast these days... enough social commentary there for now though)

Snails: Lots of them, don't do much, kills on touch.

The game has a built in timer, which is designed to steadily drain and fall but gets replenished in small pieces by collecting fruit that's scattered along each level. Fruit that APPEARS in front of you (or above) when you get near it and either you remember where it is or you run past it or you have to move back and get it, which is quite likely to disappear by the time the inertia physics slows you down enough to actually turn around and then you've wasted even more time. Time spent making no progress and always dying. It's almost like the entire game is set above 26,000ft and fruit contains oxygen (or burgers contain oxygen, magic mushrooms and such...you know...)

Cloud jumping, and octopuses...octopi? squid things.

Your items for pick up range from the axe, without which you're going to have a VERY hard time getting anywhere in the game, especially after level 1. A skateboard which makes you faster and you can survive one hit but you cannot stop moving, so expect to roll off the edge of a cliff at some point. Milk, which either boosts a lot of health or fills it up entirely depending on the small/big variety that you can collect. Bonus points symbolised by gold letters, which can be triggered to appear by doing a mixture of things such as hitting it with an axe (when you can't see it) running/jumping into a key point (no clues here either) or killing/not killing everything up to that point. Sometimes you might encounter an extra life but I'll promise you now it's under a spotted egg which summons a reaper that drains your health very quickly for a while, while sometimes you'll get a fairy from the normal eggs that will make you immortal to enemies (not holes) for a short while.

Fairy for invincibles!

The last key items are the magic mushroom which turns all fruit/food into junk food and multiplies the score of the food you collect (50 points to 500points), and a doll, which gives you a bonus of however many points your health is worth at the end of the level, and then gives you that bonus again for the doll. So finishing a level quickly while collecting everything is essential if you want to get the top score (or don't bother, just finish the game anyway). The kicker in this case is that you cannot get to level 8 if you don't get EVERY SINGLE DOLL through the game and there's one per level.

More tricks and traps, and more ways to die.

Now initially, you might think, "fair enough" and I'd make you right for the first few worlds. They're usually in places you can easily miss if you jump too high/low or if you've got the skateboard you might sail right past them, or you need to use a spring to get them but springs only really activate once and you can't exactly go back to them because the projected launch takes them outside of the left of the screen. But the real bitch of the situation, the real "I'm the programmer and I hate EVERYONE" move here (The big floppy donkey-dick move of them all) is that some of the dolls are hidden in rocks.

The more calorific, the more points it is worth.

The granddaddy cockslap to the face with the STD dick of death is the fact that some of the dolls are hidden in enemies. Sometimes it's a snail, sometimes it's a frog having to leap into a fire, other times it's a cobra. There is NO clue or indication that the things that would normally kill you, now have something you NEED to get the true final ending and area of the game. Of course, get the wrong enemy or hazard and you'll die. This is possibly the most ridiculous idea I've ever come across in a videogame aside from arbitrarily killing someone for picking the wrong doorway in a maze.

Level 4 of any world is a boss fight awaiting for you at the end.

The mechanics within the game are quite simple. Fall down a hole; dead. Get hit by ANYTHING; Dead. Run out of vitality; Dead. It's very easy in this game to die and die often, usually by the same thing. Dying results in you restarting the level or from a checkpoint in some of the levels and starting without any items in the inventory.

...and then it all went downhill.

Your enemies are a varied bunch, ranging from the slow snails, the immobile but suddenly THERE cobras, hopping frogs of 2 flavours, pelt wearing ninja-like assailants, swordfish and octopi, tribal humans/figures, bats, spiders, boulders and bosses. Each boss being a big guy that runs back and forth, hurling bouncing fireballs at you.

The boss... Same boss every time, just a new head.

Unless of course you count the rather nasty level designs when it comes to gaping chasms with platforms swaying back and forth, or platforms that drop as soon as you land on them and require you to immediately jump again, or the lift/elevator platforms of the ascending AND descending varieties. It's a game that uses up a lot of the typical things one would find in almost all future platform games and does it rather well. Making it into an interesting first step in the series by having an initially simple game that becomes fiendishly difficult within 2 worlds and outright ABUSIVELY destructive by the time you're half way through the game.

Congrats, you fucked up.

While some might throw themselves down in a pathetic display of defending this game from criticism, citing that it's an arcade game and needs to be difficult; I'll agree that arcade games are made to make money. But I shall not agree that ANY game should use the systems this game uses in order to pad out game play and deny players their lives/credits/continues by playing kamikaze egg-hunt for the dolls within the game. You wouldn't tell a kid that the Easter Bunny hid some of the eggs inside car engines on the motorway (Actually I might...) and you wouldn't start an Egg Hunt by telling kids not to go into certain places to look for the eggs AND HIDE THE EGGS THERE ANYWAY.

These guys hit you from behind, much harder to avoid if you're on the skateboard.

It's grossly unfair and unwarranted in a game and is one of the key problems that Wonder boy has. Of course, I say all this on the assumption players can GET that far to find out that the dolls are hidden, most of the time players won't get past the 2nd World anyway as the difficulty curve ramps up into a solid wall fairly quickly and then overhangs the player by that point.

Entertaining but you'd better be prepared to suffer for this one if you have any inclination at all towards beating it.

Go on, I dare you to get to this point.

In what boils down to running right, jumping and attacking if you have the axe weapon (and nothing else...) you'll have to navigate 8 worlds consisting of 4 levels (Mario anyone?) where in a boss will be found on the fourth level (Mario again?) The boss getting progressively harder and more aggressive in their movements and attacks (Mario?) while looking mostly the same apart from the head-swap issue to signify a "different" boss. The 4th level of the world is always a dark forest and is the same dark forest each time with different layouts for the enemies and traps.