Pang!

In case you didn't realise the title by now.

I have to admit to having a fondness for the 80s and 90s era of arcade gaming. Those who've ready read a lot of my blog/account/mindless-gibberish, will likely realise that I enjoy arcade gaming a lot and that I'm quite upset about its decline when the home console became an equal strength machine and then surpassed it. Leaving it just to be fruit machines, gimmick machines with guns/riding implements, coin-shovers and dancey dancey prancey trancey bollocks. However let's go back to 1990 and marvel at the wonder that is Pang!

Now that I've been to this location, am I assured to die in the near future?

The game is simple enough. You have your character running back and forth in his stereotypical hunting outfit (which suits for all locations from the top of Mt Fuji, to the frozen ice wastelands, to the Taj Mahal and beyond) and pop balloons. Apparently the world has been overrun with large bouncing ball/balloons and you (and possibly another berk) are armed with wire guns with points on the end and must hunting down and pop all the balloons.

Yes, your character is a prick.

Sounds simple and it is. Each balloon that is popped, will split into two smaller balloons until they're down to the smallest possible that bounces just high enough to sneak under at the apex of it's trajectory. These are removed from the game when popped. Larger balls can break into two and drop powerups ranging from double shot, trip wires, guns, shields, extra lives (rare, but true!) clocks to freeze the balloons and timers to increase the level limit.

Yep, still a prick.

Taking a single touch off the balloons while not shielded will end your life while your character takes a dive higher and faster and harder than any premiership footballer earning more in a week than the rest of us do in 5 years. Not only do you see the ultimate drama queen of amateur theatrics but you have to start the whole level over. Worse in 2 player as you BOTH stop if ONE gets killed by a balloon.

See the world and pop balloons. That's a lot of text to read in 10 seconds AND process it AND make an informed choice upon.

Aiding and hindering you, are the various creatures. Some will paralyse you, some will go so far as to pop balloons for you (usually right beside you to make the split-off land on you, some will just hit your wires and cause you to stop your shot and some... I've never realised what they do other than get really annoying. Perhaps that is the sole purpose of those creatures.

Trust me, it gets a lot harder, later on.

Musically there's some very upbeat tunes, the "hurry up" music isn't particularly overbearing and almost creeps into the game unlike say in Bubble Bobble where gameplay is stopped and a large klaxon goes off. The sounds are fairly solid with balloons popping with enough impact to make it feel like an accomplishment. The weapons firing have their own near-trademark recognition factor into them while the rest of the sounds are mildly muted pops squeaks and clomps. Nothing outstanding but at the same time nothing really below average either.

Some levels go for the platform approach and make it virtually impossible to avoid balloons unless you're quick.

It's nice to see some recognition has gone into the game for its locations and landmarks. Each level is 3 arenas at a specific landmark and at least the team responsible managed to make it look roughly like the landmark it's meant to represent. It's a purely graphical touch and has no impact on the gameplay but it's nice to see some effort went into it, despite the background having no actual bearing on the level or the layout of platforms and ladders.

It's just a balloon you fucking weakling!

As for a challenge, you can skip the first 18 or so levels at the start of a new game and go half way through the game from the off. A nice addition for those that already know the game and can bypass the easier levels, but the trade off is that you miss the chance to gain the points to give you lives to survive the later levels. However if you're that good in the first place, you shouldn't need the lives. Though later levels do become more difficult with blocks and platforms placed in such a manner as to make it more awkward to get past the bouncing targets and navigate towards things like the power ups and random foods that boost your scores.

New levels, new locations, new layouts, new challenges, same balloons.

There's a good challenge to this platform puzzler but once you've beaten it (if...) then you may not want to come back to it again. Some will, but that some won't be very many at all.

Space Harrier

Welcome to the fantasy zone... get repetitive.

It does seem that the further back we go in time to gaming, the simpler and slower a game is compared to the modern days of gaming. That's probably more than given as processing powers are a lot more powerful than in the older days. Given that some of the machines in the older days are running around 10 Mega Hertz and the computer I'm writing this on is a 3.4 Giga Hertz machine quad core processor. There's been a little bit of an improvement in the last 30 years or so.

 

Another late shot after you killed the enemy, but it'll happily float there and show you what killed you.

Likening this to cars, it's like saying a car back in the 80s was running at max speed of about 10 miles an hour and nowadays it can run at 3400 miles an hour. But as was said when someone made this comparison a few years back. It's nice but nobody wants to drive a car that crashes several times a day. Some will likely disagree with me on this, but I'm happy enough cruising around at 120mph thanks very much.

You get to ride a giant cat. Whose fantasy zone is this? It sure isn't mine!

Given that in 1985, you had games like Boulder Dash, Commando, Choplifter and a whole host of other such games that weren't renowned for being fast action-paced games. Space Harrier set a new bar on how to get the most out of the processors within the machine and as such, boosted the idea of arcades being more adrenaline fuelled and frantic.

Moot point, moot level.

In this instance we have Space Harrier, from SEGA doing what Sega seems to do best, making a fast action packed game with very little overall substance or even gameplay. You control FloatyMcPrickman, a blonde haired ass-hat with little real value or personality as he enters the Fantasy Zone (get ready...) with little more than the ability to fly at variable speeds that the game controls while armed with an unlimited supply of energy shots.

Each head needs to be killed, individually. Boss fights are actually more fun than the levels.

Initially, the game looks impressive. It runs fast, you're up and flying and moving around the levels with incredible speed and shooting down trees, bushes, flying robots and other such nasties while avoiding the occasional incoming projectile and the surroundings. Making yourself survive for long enough treats you to the boss monster that surges back and forth while spraying flaming rock balls at you while you try to pepper its head with shots.

Nice to see the grass has been mowed well.

Levels themselves are bright and colourful and showcasing nearly the full spectrum of colours. Though in this it also becomes hard to work out what's an enemy, what's an incoming attack and what is a background/arena aspect that can be avoided or shot down. But the psychedelic experience is what most will remember from a very colourful and very vividly graphic game.

Great... killed by a giant high speed dick-tree-mushroom thing.

Aiming is a bit of a hazard as you can only shoot straight ahead on the perspective plane. If you're in the top left of the screen, you're only going to shoot whatever is in the top left of the field of attack and to hit something that's aiming for you, you're going to have to shoot while on the move rather than strafing or orbiting them. Identifying them is also a problem from a distance, especially when there's a myriad of projectiles hurtling your way and usually you can't see specifically what the target is until it's glaring at you in the face and heading away again while it's invulnerable arse is lovingly displayed to you.

Finally, something mildy recognisable.

That said, the game for the most part is relatively easy if you keep in mind that projectiles are very direct and very exact. The difficulty comes when you've got other things to worry about such as the flight paths of enemies, the oncoming obstacles and the general shift and movement of the arena while you're moving around within it. The further difficulty comes from where you've gotten used to the fact you can shoot the floating rocks and huge trees in one level, then when the next level turns up, you find you CAN'T shoot the large structures and instead fly straight into it like a moth to a flame.... before being blasted by a brick.

I can't imagine the East End of London named this level.

The game does love to taunt you however, namely by showing you enemies and speeding them away before anything happens. Or even worse, when you DO die, whatever it was that hit you just stands there, remaining perfectly poised in showing you THIS IS WHAT KILLED YOU! while the rest of the game carries on around it. Aside from this, there's not much more to the game other than finding out what new sprites await in later levels and how much more difficult they can make the game by hurling more and more awkward enemies at you at regular intervals. Even the bosses start to become recycled and the game continues this way until the unceremoniously defeated final boss happens.

Though few will both spending the cash and time getting to the umpteenth repetitive level.

Later, flying jellyfish. For now, repeated robot sprites.

Having said that, the music is fairly memorable and toe-tapping for each composition contained with the game while the control system is a little overly responsive to movement but whether this is because of the way it plays and feels that it should play or is on the part of the designers to smoke out some more credits, is a harder question to answer. There's a lot of nostalgia factor in this game and those that remember it will do very well to make sure that it stays remembered and ONLY remembered, this is not a game to revisit.

Sometimes the game randomly speeds up, and catches me off-guard... the cheating bastard.

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.