Sonic The Hedgehog

Sonic.

It's a name nowadays that conjures up mixed feelings and emotions, all depending upon how old someone is and how well versed they are with the long series of games this little blue mammal. If you take a look at the more recent games, some will say that there's been relative success in capturing the fun back into the games with titles such as Sonic Unleashed and Sonic 4, though this is a point of contention amongst the extremely jaded and divided fan-base.

With which, I entirely sympathise. A series they've grown to love over the decades is being systematically fucked up beyond all recognition (yes, FUBAR'd) by rushed deadlines, cut corners and lack of decent quality control and testing which is being acted upon in post-development. Seems a lot of games have that little issue, they're tested and found to have faults but nobody is rectifying this stuff as it's the bottom dollar the company bigwigs are really interested in. But I'm not going down that particular route today.

I could go on about whether or not the Sonic games for Dreamcast and GameCube were any good or not, I may even review them at a later date. But for now we're going back to the Megadrive (...Genesis) and looking at the first outing by our 23 year old cerulean spiked one. (and let's get the giggles out of the system now before I start to mention Blast Processing... who the hell came up with that one needs to be given an award for having the balls to make that up then shot for being a prick)

Mr Needlemouse (look it up), lives in a wonderfully designed and colourful world where naturally growing and occurring loops, spins and corkscrews are common everyday happen place events. In this saccharine world however, is a royally fat-fuck asshat called Dr Robotnik (No, not Eggman, we don't talk about that in this game and that term wasn't coined for many a year) who was formerly Dr Ivo Kintobor and in some instances of back-story, helped Sonic to develop his speed and blueness through experimentation of a friendly sort. See kids, animal testing can be a positive thing! (This reviewer does not condone animal testing of any kind, except testing how many government politicians it takes to slake a carnivorous animal of its bloodlust)

The mean old naughty bad-man, Dr Robotnik, decided it would be a good idea to turn all the cute little animals in the land into robots. He also decided he'd take the Chaos Emeralds (of which just ONE is actually emerald coloured, must be some genetic testing by-product thing) so he can do more naughty things. Cue our cobalt coloured hero deciding that after many MANY robots have been made, that this cannot be allowed to continue and our journey begins in the first level where we, as players, basically run right. There may be some jumping and rolling at times, the occasional boss every 3rd stage of a level and a few bonus levels if you're great at collecting coins... I mean rings.

That's the game in a shell of nuts.

There's a lot to be said in the game for the fast flowing pace of the main character gradually building up speed, pressing down to roll and then sending our azure ball of spikes racing through ramps, loop-de-loops and soaring sky high on springs and bouncing things. The game belts along at an almost breathtaking pace that eventually becomes a test of "how fast can the game scroll through its own levels" rather than actually playing the game. Occasionally you may have to WALK somewhere back and forth and in some of the levels there's a considerably slower pace being forced upon the player with the whole "jumping onto platforms and being slowly, SLOWLY, moved across lava safely". Although, with this being the first game, there's some leeway in arguing that the designers may not have been sure as to what kind of game they were producing at this point.

Because this is the first game, there's no spin-dash move. That wonderfully typical, nay, ESSENTIAL technique in the second game onwards that allows you to build up speed while being motionless before racing off going from 0-60mph before you can say internal-organ-rupturing. So when you're faced with a ramp leading upwards and you're not going fast enough to clear it, you'll have to run back and try again with more momentum built up so that you can clear the ramp. It becomes a rather annoying point when you especially lack the speed and jumping height to simply hop over the ramp and instead start bouncing back and forth like a bus full of kids after all the passengers were given energy drinks for breakfast.

You still get the pre-requisite power-ups though. A shield to help you tank a hit of damage, any and every ring you pick up will allow you to take a hit of damage and drop all the rings, so having one ring at any time will save you from death unless that death is being crushed, landing on spikes and bouncing onto MORE spikes (mercy invincibility does NOT work on spikes) or falling off the bottom of the level, will kill you outright. Speedy shoes for moving EVEN faster and seeing even less of the level while you race through it quicker than Jessie Owen doing a victory lap through Berlin. Other power ups include extra lives and more rings as well as the invincibility effect that negates spikes but not being crushed or falling off the game.

Getting to the end of a level with more than 50 rings gives you the opportunity (unless there's a boss) to jump up into the giant ring, which will magically take you to a bonus round. Where you get the opportunity to navigate as a jumping ball through a constantly rotating maze with psychedelic backgrounds and hopefully attain either enough rings to achieve a continue, or get the Chaos Emerald hidden within the core of the level, before being dropped out by hitting a "goal" icon. Getting all of them nets you the lovely "good ending" where you make the science fat man cry and your character does something mildly impressive; walking left for a bit by himself.

Each level in the game usually has multiple ways of getting through the level, taking higher or lower routes depending upon how quickly you can leap up to various heights and land on outcrops rather than not, each route having its own share of tricks and traps to navigate while fighting off various enemies (there's usually 2-3 types of enemy per level) and the bosses which have a small level of ingenuity behind them not seen until the 3rd game and cross over with Sonic/Knuckles cart. Hit the boss 8 times to win, and then free all the collected furry friends from the large metal ball.

Variety between levels is diverse, but with this comes a lack of cohesion. One level has you running through the lush green (and mathematically formulaic) setting of the Green Hill zone, before turning up to lava and underground purples of Marble Hill with no real indication of whether it's simply a few steps away or there's been a long travel from one to the other filled with multiple hardships and angst on the part of our main character overcoming his doubt and self-loathing to see his way through towards taking up the responsibility of defending the land in which he inhabits.

No, you just turn up.

I've deliberately ignored one aspect of this game until now. Take the game as it is, bright, colourful, full of fluid motion and fast game play (when you get a decent run up) and then go a little further into the wonderful land of Labyrinth Zone. And already I can hear some people reading this and groaning in the dawning realisation of where I'm going with this. It's a simple enough set of levels where you'll face off against a few enemies which pose little threat but then the big threat is the water. Sonic can drown here and you'll get a few light warnings to escape. When there's about 15 seconds to go you'll be treated to some of the most harrowing, terrifying and rather upsetting music akin to a sped up and high-octane version of Jaws, before the music stops and Sonic just drowns. Complete with count-down timer, which all induces high panic levels and lack of co-ordination until you get yourself to an air bubble, or jump back out of the water.

Allow me to reintroduce you to your own nightmares http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yw5jkAHgME with thanks to YouTube for hosting.

Now that I've ripped apart enough of people's childhood memories or introduced some people to a few new ones, I'll take my leave by departing with this little snippet. The game is not great, it never was. It served a purpose as a launch pad of mediocrity against poor competition and won many over with its speed and sacrificed actual game play mechanics to do it, repeated in later instalments with less control and more autonomy from the game. Given this game is missing some of the much needed improvements implemented in Sonic 2 and Sonic 3, there's little to be said for this one save that it served a purpose, started something reasonably impressive but failed to deliver even back in the day. If you've never played it before, don't. If you have, go back and see just how far we've come by comparing it to Sonic 3 and/or Sonic and Knuckles and be thankful that someone decided to make the changes the first game needed.

Tetris

Nearly everyone has played this one. If you yourself are too young to have played it, I can almost 100% promise that your parents have. Originally made in 1985 and world popularised in 1989 by being released with the "new at the time" Original Gameboy, Tetris was THE addictive puzzler in computer gaming and by god was it.

The premise is fairly simply, as should be with all puzzle games that want to welcome in anyone and keep them a long time playing the game. You have a blank area that's about 9 blocks wide and about 30 blocks high (depending upon versions, some go to STUPID lengths of having thousands of blocks wide). Within this area, Tetriminoes (Check the official company for the spelling, they don't like "Tetrominoes"), descend from the top of the area and fall steadily towards the bottom. These are shapes made up of arrangements of 4 blocks to form 7 unique shapes. Once they hit the bottom, they stick and become immobile, where upon a new shape will fall from the top again.

The game is about making entire full rows of blocks line up by fitting, slotting and shifting the shapes into an appropriate position so that a whole, horizontal line can be completed from one side to another. Once this is achieved, that line disappears and everything above that line drops down to fill the now-empty space. Giving the player more space to keep playing. The score goes up depending upon the number of lines cleared (a maximum of 4 lines from using a 4x1 shaped piece) and while the score goes up, the speed of the game goes up too.

Different game modes allow for playing either to get to 200 lines and by extension, level 20 in speed which leaves you virtually NO time to shift falling blocks into place or rotate them. Or the other mode where you have to beat the game by getting 25 lines but starting with arenas that have randomly filled walls-with-gaps already in place. Other variations of the game include things like having special blocks within the shapes that act as bombs, or using the ability to store a piece for later use, or getting specific back-to-back combinations of line removals for further bonuses. Or even a vs. mode where getting rid of sets of lines will bump up your opponents lines but in such a way that they could quickly reverse the lines being sent to them and send them back with interest.

Other games and variations have Wordtris where the blocks are made up of scrabble shapes and you have to make words rather than making lines, or you have the ill-conceived Sextris where you're dropping in naked people in various positions and have to remove them by getting them into hump-able positions (I had a very odd childhood didn't I...) before they vanish and allow for more naked people to fall into the fray. Or it could be that you're playing the game in 3D and have multiple layers in the Z-Axis to fill too, or you're playing it in First Person Mode or it's about using shapes to create platforms for a platform jumping character (Mario usually...) to progress across the level in some fashion or another.

Later iterations of the game would play online and allow people to compete around the world in 8way games and having team modes and such. Basically as the technology increases and new elements of gaming are found, someone somewhere is going to add in a Tetris effect along the lines from porn to faces, hats, 3D shapes, rotating the arena rather than the pieces, gravity/physics effects and so on.

The base game however, is still just dropping blocks into an area and filling up a space neatly. It appeals on a LOT of levels and in particular, the OCD group, as this is the ultimate cleaning up game.

It's because the game is so simple and accessible that virtually everyone and their parents have played this at one time or another in some fashion or another. Even adventure games have variations of sorting and arranging spaces, such as Resident Evil 4 where in the inventory, you had to make sure everything was neatly packed away or you'd have difficulties buying new items and such. A bit of a weak example, I know, but the influence is still there and can be found in a great many other games through the ages, even parody examples in games like I Wanna Be The Guy (Press R now, just do it)

As such it's hard to just review Tetris given that it's the phenomenon that it has become, but perhaps that should be the focus rather than the game itself. This is a game that started as a puzzle game and ended up transcending time space and the 4th dimension in some versions of the game where a 2D plane has 4D shapes represented by 3D displays in the 2D plane and changes through versions of itself bending inside and outside to form tesseracts (Hyper cubes) and then fitting THOSE into the area to clear out lines.

How the hell someone is going to get their head around that one ... Actually it's quite a fun game once your mind starts to see things in 4 dimensions.

But this just shows how adaptable a player can become from such humble beginnings within a game. There's no save function it's just you and the area. While there have been a GREAT many contenders to the throne, from columns to bean games, to puzzle fighter and so on, Tetris remains such a firm staple of video game history that very rarely can a falling block puzzle game be made that doesn't owe something to Tetris. It's quick, easily playable (especially the original versions, new versions sometimes over complicate things) and of such a pick-up-and-play focus that you can sit down for a session or two and be done within 5 minutes or find that you're looking outside and the 4 Horsemen are looking over your shoulder and waiting for you to catch up with the rest of the apocalypse because you were too busy to join the rapture.

And I bet they'll want to play it before claiming your sorry soul, and they'll likely be better at than you.

Limbo

If you're the kind of person considering throwing yourself under a bus, or under a car; if you're the kind of person that thinks the long walk off the short cliff/pier is a good choice; if you're the kind of person that feels that parachuting without a parachute into a landfill site topped with explosives is a more preferable thing to do; if you're the kind of person that feels that running chainsaws need to be deep-throated and if you're the kind of person that has read this far and feels like topping themselves... this game really isn't for you.

Limbo, depending upon your interpretation and religion or insight into the afterlife, is usually defined as a half-way house between dying and getting to an after-life. Sometimes it's an eternal state of just "being" determined as neither good nor bad, sometimes it's a form of temporal punishment to balance out minor sins before being given the keys to the afterlife. In this case it's a very stylish platformer, rich in variety and physics based puzzles that wouldn't be too far from home as a Flash game, but instead we get it on various formats.

The story has been used a few times, someone dies and a grieving loved one takes a trip into the afterlife to go and get them back. Though this entirely belies the fantastic artwork and picturesque scenery of the game. You control LargeHeadBoy with his odd gambling gait and incredible jumping powers of... not that much, as he traverses an epic quest into Limbo through lands unknown heading deeper and further into the world created and facing off all manner of creatures, spiders, brain slugs, other kids, traps, traps and traps.

You've NO weapons, NO power ups, NO way to defend yourself save for the environment around you. Sometimes switches can be hit, boxes moved and things climbed upon but that's your entire arsenal in a very dark and dreary world.

And what a dreary world it is. The entire game is in black and white, by which I mean greyscale but saying that tends to give the wrong impression of the game and its achievements. While travelling through the land of Limbo, there's plenty of scope to see the rich environments and backgrounds the game has to offer, usually before having to avoid being cut up, squished, impaled and god knows what attacking you at inopportune moments, or even drowning. Yes there's plenty of ways to die in this game and you'll likely see most of them.

Travelling from forests and craters, industrial areas, cityscapes, abandoned buildings, to the point of being within infernal machines of an immense size and scale, the game can likely be beaten within a few hours from start to finish on a first play through. Each trap usually has a specific way of getting around it, getting past it or through it in various means and guises. Sometimes the traps will fake you out, like the Squishers where landing on the button triggers the trap and kills you while the next Squisher will kill you if you DON'T land on the button in that funny little (read: fucking annoying) way of twisting the rules that designers like to do.

Sometimes you might get past a trap and not realise it but for the most part, you'll inwardly congratulate yourself every time you make significant progress and overcome a particularly odious little trap. Some require hitting X and getting to Y before it's too late, others are just making sure you're not stood at point X when Y happens and in the final acts of the game, timing and planning become almost essential. Some traps however are fairly obvious though the most awkward ones have to be the brain slugs, a set of unavoidable instances where you'll be forced to walk forwards until meeting sunlight and then turning around, while having to navigate blocks, crates, platforms and traps until you're able to locate something that can eat the brain slug back out of your head. Otherwise you're brown-bread. It's an interesting take on the trap settings but does have that awkward drawback of forcing the player ahead at a pace that isn't their own and in a game like this, feels like you're either being rushed forwards or being arbitrarily instructed to get your arse in gear and move the hell along.

The game is bleak, don't get me wrong, everything might look impressive but at the same time, oppressive. The eternal darkness of the game getting more and more foreboding the deeper you get into Limbo and the less friendly the area looks. Especially once the spinning saw blades start up, electrified floors and so on, make their appearance and then everything looks like it's out to get you, including machinegun nests which do seem a little out of place at times. Though that's nothing to say of the rather determined giant spider back near the start of the game.

Yes, arachnophobics might want to skip the first part of the game. It's a biggy and the size that would take up a whole house if it spread out. Yes you're on the menu. Though don't expect to win throughout on skill, the control system is sometimes a little unresponsive and you don't always quite get the run-up you thought you might in some of the more treacherous leaps and bounds you have to make, which leads to a rather frustrating series of deaths that you KNOW are not your fault.

Graphically, the game is proudly wearing the "Art" style and makes full use of its lack of colour to tease and titillate the player, hints of lighter grey become rays of sunlight and seen less and less in the later levels and areas of the game, while at times the game can be a little difficult to identify what something is and what can be used or not used when almost everything is jet black in the foreground. But that is expected when you're trying to go for the doom/gloom and dank approach to the style. It works for the atmosphere but not always for the functionality of the game itself.

Though no atmospheric game could be complete without the soundtrack, of which there is little of one. It's much more ambient than boasting a soundtrack in the conventional sense. It all adds to the theme of oppression and overbearing undertones that build to a crescendo accompanying most of the more difficult and drawn out instances of traps and gauntlets that need to be run to progress within the game. The final puzzle set in the game featuring gravity switches and perfect timing, brings the music crashing into silence in a rather jarring and fantastically accompanying visual aesthetic.

Having said that, it does feel short as a game. A lot of pride, attention and bleak detail has gone into the game and rather than repeat things over and over to pad the game out, it feels that the game was half finished before a deadline and they decided to bring it crashing to a halt through a plate glass window. (Hidden reference there...). Which leaves you oddly satisfied to have beaten the game but a longer for more, not so much more in regards to the plot and the final revelation, but to see more tricks, traps and crazy environments that the game has fantastically delivered up to this point.

Part of me wants to learn more about the setting, more about how this place came to be, who the kids are at the start and if they're like you; wandering a world in search of something but lost their ways and now descend into a medley of chaos and 'Lord Of The Flies' children, how the huge city came to be and why it's so rundown, why the world is still mechanically running with nobody around to run it (not that we can see anyway...) but then I'm also reminded of a little point I bring up every now and then for back stories that aren't explained. Is it ever explained in Little Red Riding Hood as to how the Wolf can talk? No. As such it need not be explained here either, though in this game, I do want to see more which is a rarity for myself.

It's this level of intrigue that both adds and subtracts from the game's appeal, it encourages one to run through the game again to find more visual clues, if we're going on the idea that anything seen is pertinent and valuable and nothing is pointless, there is reason for everything as part of the bigger picture and whole. But at the same time, it's a little on the short side and you'll find yourself racing through chapters later on without even realising it until suddenly you hit the glass ceiling of the game and realise that this is it, it's all over.

As for wandering through Limbo, there's more dangerous (barely) and less visually satisfying games that try the same thing. Certainly worth a look if you want give Limbo a try.

Double Dragon (Arcade)

While not the first beat em up with depth (moving to the background and the foreground) Double Dragon is believed firmly to be the first co-operative playing beat-em-up. This is quite the break from tradition, previous games being of the 1 vs. 1, mano e mano, method of playing where two pointless characters stop everything to kick seven shades of shit out of each other. Or the brawling games known for having one character on a lone quest to stomp out several hundred other characters in the name of stomping for the sake of stomping.

Double Dragon, the great grand daddy of the brawling games. Featuring large sprites, scrolling levels and backgrounds, huge bosses (sometimes) and even a little cut scene at the start showing the motivation anyone needs for punching, kicking, whipping, baseball-batting, knifing, massive number of colour swap dudes to death (and a few dudettes); a woman gets punched and carried off. Can't think of a better reason myself to start a huge brawl against one of the possibly the largest gangs in the world with more members than McDonalds has workers.

The game's premise isn't exactly ground breaking and not something that hadn't been done before in games or films. One (or two, for the first time ever) man, conveniently colour coded in blue and red, sets out to avenge a woman by breaking skulls, legs, and generally beating to death every single thing in his way. Your method of executing this is the now oft recognised means of walking, punching, kicking, jumping, grabbing weapons and using these skills and abilities in a myriad of ways to overcome all obstacles in the protagonist’s way.

Unlike other incarnations of the same game, on different systems, you start out with full access to all your moves and abilities. You have the 8 directional movement, you have your punch button, kick button and jump button. A simple system yet the game allows for more involvement than just this. While you're walking up to enemies and punching and kicking them, repeated hits allow for bonus moves such as roundhouses and uppercuts. Jumping while attacking can give flying kicks, or reverse jump kicks if you're not moving. Double tapping a direction gives the well-known, head butt and use of both attacks at the same time performs the elbow smash which in itself, is a huge game-breaker if used to maximum exploitative means.

Enemies usually come at you in waves of 1 to 3 opponents at a time, bosses are either some HUGE guy(s) (called Abobo... go check the flash game out based on just him) or a very tough clone of the main characters. Or it's the final boss being a cheap bastard with a machinegun that can still be butchered with the same exploit moves. Having said that though, some of the boss set ups can be rather straining on the machine, particularly on the second level where there's a significant slow down as a result of the multiple enemies on the display.

Each level starts with the characters on the far left and progression is made by walking to the right, navigating occasionally ladders and pits which rather unfairly remove a whole life if you're dumb enough to walk into them or unfortunate enough to be throw/knocked into them. Once having walked right enough to run out of the appropriate level, the boss appears and attempts to kill you rather quickly. Interestingly for the game, once a level is beaten you actually are seen to move to the next section in an almost seamless progression before starting over on the right-walking once again.

Just to avoid too much monotony, certain enemies drop weapons or some levels feature extra items that can be used such as cardboard boxes (ow?...no I don't think so), barrels (that's more like it), or gifts like dynamite (who seriously brings dynamite to fight?) knives, baseball bats, whips and such. Each level providing more and more deadly traps from pitfalls at construction yards, broken bridges, walkways and being stabbed by statues or slammed by shifting bricks... yeah that last one is rather Indiana Jones and very much a break in the style of the game, serving as nothing more than a means to drain your coins and credits with heavily punishing damage from what seems to be dodgy collision detection and arbitrary "you're fucked" moves.

The difficulty ramps up exponentially through the game by the use of more awkward locations, the previously mentioned "fuck you" damages from level 5 and that every enemy increases in health for each level you progress. The supposed difficulty however is not from the challenge the enemy provides as each enemy fights the same way no matter what level they're on, it's a grind fest of damaging a health bar you can't see. Unlike games like Final Fight or Violent storm, there's no way of knowing how much damage you've caused to an individual in seeing if you've done 1 bar or 5 bars of injury, or if they're on 50 bars before you fight. As such, you've no way of seeing which moves are the most effective in killing your opponents. But if you're winning and surviving, that can be seen as a progression of sorts.

The co-operative aspect of the game, all depends upon how well your partner can play. While it's an idea to see someone getting beaten up and wanting to jump in and save them with a flurry of wild attacks, the game will register the attacks on the other person, meaning you'll hurt them, maybe even kill them. The potential for knocking someone down and killing them in pits, or hurling huge weapons that bulldoze everyone including your partner, there's a lot of dick moves to enjoy and before long you'll be punching the person playing with you, and the fight continues outside of the game into the arcade and the friendship is over. Maybe, thankfully.

However, despite the dickary potential, it's a solidly good co-operative game that excels in the aim of being enjoyable for 2 people to play. Except at the very end, where if both players have defeated the last boss, the guy with the machinegun, then the real final boss becomes, the other player in an all-out battle on one life (or more if you REALLY want to spend coins) for the right to rescue the punched-out woman from the start of the game. It's an odd situation for a game to encourage a solid co-operative attempt throughout, only to then reward the players with turning them against each other by force and play as opponents. An original game concept in its execution and one that's rarely been repeated in games since then. (Streets of Rage perhaps depending upon choices).

Musically, I think nearly everyone that knows of this game, at the mention of Double Dragon could hum a few bars of the theme tune and likely the first level as well. It's choppy and upbeat for the most part and definitely reeks of an 80s composition vibe heard in multiple tracks released that decade, particularly the earlier years of the decade. It's not something you'd bump your head to, but you'll find yourself humming it along with the game as it worms its way into your ear.

The game though, does suffer from the repetition of repeat plays, being an arcade game you know every time which enemies will appear, holding what and so on but I'm beating at a limitation of coding rather than the game's actual faults. It still holds well on the nostalgia factor and will bring people back for the occasional play just to remember what the game was like and to remind ourselves of how far we've come from such roots. Despite the aged looks and appearance, the game is still just as playable which is more than could be said for a lot of other games and the rather unique aspect the game does have (beyond being the first co-op brawler) was that it had more moves and attacks than say games like Final Fight which relied upon attacking, jumping and special/desperation moves.

I have to say, were I to actually own an arcade, I'd have this one out on the floor. Not at the forefront perhaps, but down the back or the sides, a little darker in presenting than the others but it'd be there, for those willing to explore a little further, willing to see a little more and see the older days as a show of honour. Not without flaws but given it started something, it did it well enough that many games failed to match it. Now THAT deserves recognition in the least.