However

Yes, I just added another web comic to the links page. It’s not exactly a proper update, and it’s almost all I’ve been doing lately, but you’ll have to live with it for now. At least it’s an update at all.

If you want to see a startlingly accurate article, you should take a read at this and then go over this site for a few days. You’ll be both scared and saddened by how right Jeremy is. And that’s it for today. I’ll be seeing you around. With kaleidoscope eyes.

~Ryan out.

Waldo + Bust-A-Move – A Double ROM Review!

As a gamer, I’ve seen a lot of crap. And by a lot, I mean tons. There are literally hundreds of craptacular games out there. Sure, the Playstation and PS2 have tons and tons of titles, but over 90% of those games are utter bullhock. Not to say that Nintendo systems are without their stinkers. Just looking back on the SNES and thinking of bad games for it makes me cringe. Heck, even the GameBoy Advance is a victim of this virulent affliction. Anyone can see they suck, but people must be buying them, cause they keep getting made.

On the other hand, we’ve got some real gems too. Speaking as a fanboy, almost every one of Nintendo’s games have been of excellent quality. Sure, production values are sometimes sold short, but they’re almost always fun. And it’s not only Nintendo, of course. A lot of other companies have very nice track records, like Namco, Squaresoft and Enix (which are now conveniently rolled up into one), and Rare. It’s companies like this that make people keep coming back for more. If it were only crappy whored-out movie/TV licenses (Matrix and Simpsons, lookin’ at you), video games would have been dead long ago.

So if I’m talking about both sides of the spectrum in one article, what the Hell is going on? Well, simply put, I’m reviewing one crappy game and one excellent game. Why do both at once? Well not only am I trying to make some kind of deeper meaning or something only an English professor could figure out, but neither game that I chose to review could possibly fill an entire properly-sized article. So now that you know what’s going on, I’ll start with the bad news.

Yes, that’s right. I’m going to subject you to something so bad that you’re bound to appreciate the better of the two. Now that’s a clever little idea right there, isn’t it? Glad I thought of it while typing that last sentence. Yes. Yes… But anywho, you remember Waldo, right? That guy who everyone was consistently trying to find? Ha, I can see that look on your face right now. I love that “Oh God no! They made a game out of that!?” look. It’s so… je ne sais quoi. But yeah, they made a game out of Waldo.

Actually, they made at least two games out of him! I remember renting the NES game, and damned if that wasn’t the worst 5 bucks ever spent. Actually, buying the game would constitute as worse, so I guess second worst 5 bucks ever spent will have to do. But it was entirely impossible. As far as I can remember the “maps” were huge and you got very little time and only a small sphere of vision. And if my memory is right, they stupid-fied the SNES version like rap music does to anyone who listens to it.

After the title screen, we get treated to the difficulty select right away. And let me tell you, you’ll be blown away by this. The difficulty levels in this game are Normal, Expert, and Waldo. Yes, instead of an “easy” level, they put Waldo. And no, it doesn’t just say “Waldo” where “easy” should be, there’s just a big graphic of his head and upper torso. I let curiosity get to me, and dammit, the Waldo level was just the exact same map five times in a row. Who’d have known? And why would they put something so ridiculous in a game? It beats me, but since Waldo was so easy, I’ll try Expert next.

After I picked the difficulty, I got a choice of four different graphics. A dangerously obese man-thing (anything that fat cannot be classified properly as a man), two guys who looked to be getting drunk [whilst sitting] on magic carpets, a strange pig-like thing with spikes and a hugeass nose, and some guy throwing what looked to be liquid Play-Doh on a robe-sporting man. It decisions like this that make life so difficult. I figured eventually I’d have to see them all, so I took the drunk carpet guys.

And this is what I got. I don’t know, but I feel as it there’s something wrong with this picture. Oh, maybe it’s that it’s following the exact same stereotypes as the Where’s Waldo books. I’m not exactly sure, but I think they might be in Arabia somewhere. If that’s even a place. I did really bad in geography class. But anywho, you’ll notice that everyone here is coloured. Not only that, but they’re all wearing turbans and sashes, and riding on carpets. And when in the Hell did they invent a country where anyone and everyone was required to be on the rooftops? And why didn’t they ask me to be a part of that country?

Next I chose the pig face thing, and we move from somewhere in Africa to the medieval times, where everyone has changed from black to white. Where is the equality? I’m already sick of this game and its racist stereotypes. Didn’t the creators of this game ever see that movie Black Knight? But now I’ll direct your attention to some on-screen stuff. Near the bottom, we can see a gray brick. Clicking it gives you 150 points. Somewheres near the middle right side of the pic is a clock, which increases the time you have to find Waldo. And speak of the devil, there he is right beside the magnifying glass! That level sure was a breeze.

The other two levels are pretty much the exact same things. I should note a couple things about the gameplay here, I guess. Now obviously there’s a time limit, and you can extend it by picking up those clocks. But honestly, you don’t even need the whole first clock to complete a level. The only thing that takes any time at all is finding the other objective, a scroll. They, unlike Waldo, can be hidden quite well, as they’re small and can be fit behind things quite easily. But of course, they rarely are, so each level will take you about 30 seconds, and that’s if you stop to pick everything up.

One other thing I forgot to mention that influences the game in a big way is the size of the maps. For one, they’re very, very small. Bite-sized, even. And to top it all off, they only scroll horizontally. This may not sound like such a big deal, but considering how big everything is, you’ve got an extremely small zone of probability of where Waldo can be hiding. A zone of probability comparable to that of an electron. And that’s pretty much all there is to it. You scroll around until you see the scroll and Waldo, and you’re done.

But what would a game be without its bonus levels? I’d be a game without bonus levels. But Waldo’s game has one. Yeah, one… If you manage to find the strange Waldo-dog in a level, you get to fly around on a magic carpet collecting bones. Now you don’t have to be in the magic carpet level to get this bonus, it’s the exact same on every level. Yeah. They went through all the trouble of making four levels, so why not four bonus levels? Maybe then I wouldn’t feel so cheated. Maybe if there were more than 8 people on the staff, they would have put in individual bonus levels. We’ll never know now.

So if you just so happen to beat all four levels, you get taken to the super-secret fifth level! Woah! Never saw that coming! It’s just the same thing, but with no extra pickups and one tiny little twist. There’s a lot of Waldos here, see, and only one is the right one. That right Waldo just happens to have lost one of his shoes. It’s a long shot, but at least they tried. I’m still not satisfied. And what do you get for finding shoeless Waldo?

Even Super Mario freaking Brothers had more of an ending than that. The question remains, though, why did I want to get the scrolls back? He’s obviously not going to do anything for me. Hell, he could be evil incarnate for all we know. Maybe the instruction booklet had some kind of story in its pages, but I really doubt that possibility. I bet this game didn’t even have an instruction booklet. You can only use two buttons the entire game, so there’s really nothing anyone needs help to figure out. Even Jessica Simpson could figure this one out. (Okay, the joke was a bit stale, but I couldn’t think of anything else.)

I think I can sum up the entire review portion into one paragraph here. Graphics were so-so. The animation was at a max two frames switching back and forth. The sound and music wasn’t much better. The music was forgettable and might have been annoying too. The sound may have consisted of a couple beeps and one really bad voice sample that says “Where’s Waldo?” every damn time something happens. Gameplay was boring and simplistic. I finished all three difficulty levels in less that 10 minutes total. If that doesn’t tell you that this game needs a little tuning, what will?

As a final note, I’d like to just plainly say that The Great Waldo Search sucked. It doesn’t even deserve to be italicized. I’m being kind enough just capitalizing the letters there. It sucked hard. Don’t even download the ROM. You’d be better off doing something productive like taking a dump or making a macaroni statue of Jerry Seinfeld. I guess the only good thing you could possibly say about the game is that the maps are fairly faithful to the books. Other than that, total crap. At this halfway point, I’m at about 1600 words, and the next game will probably yield a shorter review, because lo and behold, it’s a puzzle game. If you want, this would be a great time to go get a snack or something. It’s okay, I’ll wait for you.

I hope you’re done whatever you chose to do at our little intermission, cause I’m getting back to business now. Waldo was a horrible stain on the tapestry that is the history of video games, but the next game is one of my all-time favorite puzzle games ever: Bust-A-Move! Now the tricky part is going to be making it to the 2500 word mark, because there just isn’t a whole lot you can say about puzzle games. Fortunately, since I love this game so much, I could probably drone on and on about it for quite a while.

Hooray! Look at the happy little dragons. Incase you didn’t know or are having trouble placing it, they’re the same characters from Bubble Bobble, one of my old NES favorites. Bub and Bob make their grand puzzle debut here, and they do a marvelous job of it too. And as an added little trivia note, the game also comes packaged on every system from arcade machines to the Nintendo 64, and sometimes it’s known as Puzzle Bobble. But I’ll refer to it as Bust-A-Move, because it’s such a catchy phrase. The more you know!

Because there isn’t a whole lot of screenshot variety in a game like this, I got this great idea that taking a pic of the “modes” screen would be a good idea. Only what am I supposed to say about it? Let’s see what we have here. I’m obviously going to choose the 1P Play, because I’ve got nobody to play against and I’ll be damned if I’m gonna challenge anybody’s record. As for options, I need no options! Though a sound test would be fun…

Like most people, I don’t know any passwords, so I have to start all the way from Round 1. it’s not so bad, because these easy rounds are great for racking up huge points! It’s a pretty simple game at heart. You start with a bunch of bubbles hanging from the ceiling (Bubble Bobble fans will recognize the little guys trapped in the bubbles). Your job is to shoot bubbles up to pop the one on the roof. You get one randomly coloured bubble at a time, and you have to “line up” three or more bubbles of the same colour to pop them.

But of course it sounds easy! It is, for the most part. The only thing that gets in your way is the fact that you can get a lot of rubbish bubbles when you need particular colours, building a huge ball of garbage off to a side. And on top of that, you’re racing the clock, as the roof keeps getting lower, and if a bubble ever goes below that line near the bottom, you’re done. If you do manage to clear all the bubbles from the screen, it’s happiness and dancing dragons for you! In conclusion, yes, it is an easy game.

Now after a couple learning levels, the game spices it up a bit with some different types of special bubbles. In the pic above, you can see a fiery bubble among all of the regular bubbles. If you hit this guy with a bubble, it’ll explode into a big ball of flame and vaporize any bubbles within a small radius of where it once was. This is very useful for clearing out patches of trash bubbles, and lets you complete the round shown above in only three shots.

There are a couple other types of special bubbles, like the electric bubble pictured above. Shooting this one will send a lightning bolt blazing across the screen, destroying any bubbles that get in its way. It can be even handier than the fiery bubble, especially if it’s at the top of the screen and there’s a clear path towards it. The last special bubble I’ve seen is a watery bubble that lets a flow of water downward, changing the colour of all the bubbles below it to a single colour, making them easy pickin’s.

Like I said earlier, if you aren’t swift enough in your bubble-busting ways, you’ll get smoked by the torrent of bubbles. The poor little dragon fell over… If that’s not incentive enough to lose, let’s put it this way; when you do lose, all your points go with you. So continuing would put your score back at a measly zero. Unlike some games though, Taito thought ahead and doles out plenty of continues so you can keep going. They aren’t infinite though, so don’t slack off too much.

I might add that there is one finer point to losing. When you do lose, if you choose to come back, you get an aiming tool that helps a lot. You can’t see it in the pic above because it flashes and I pressed the button at the wrong second. It’s not my fault though, the little dragon was yelling at me to hurry up. But it does take all the guesswork out of the game, so you only get it for one level. After that, you’ll have to rely on your knowledge of simple physics. Unfortunately, they wouldn’t let me take the course because I’m no good at math, so all I can do is hope my aim is true.

I’m not sure why I love this game, but anyone who’s ever gone to a movie with me can surely back that claim up. If there’s an absence of Metal Slug, you just know I’m gonna be at a Bust-A-Move machine until my quarters run dry or they manage to pry me off the machine because we’ve already missed the previews. I think one of the biggest factors that keeps me coming back is the music. It’s always the same tune over and over, but I love it so. If you need a little idea of how it goes, here’s a link to a remix of the main tune. It’s not quite the same as the original, but I can still put it on loop for hours and not get annoyed.

To wrap this one up in a single paragraph doesn’t do it justice, but I will anyway. The graphics are colourful and fun, almost giving off a Yoshi’s Island vibe. The music, as I already stated, is very cute and loveable. Sound effects include happy “yay!”s and such from the dragons, and the always fun bubble popping sound. The gameplay is that of a puzzle game: simple, but at the same time complex. Controls are nice and precise, and give you the accuracy you need for tricky shots.

Overall, I still love this game, and when it gets ported to the Nintendo 20075, I’ll still love it. When I go see whatever movie I deem worthy of seeing 30 years in the future, I’ll still love it, and my accomplices will still have to convince me that the movie is what we came to see. I suggest finding a GBA version, or if (God forbid) that doesn’t actually exist, go for one of the older GB games. If you can’t find one of those, look for the PS2 version. As a last resort, download one of the many ROM versions. Usually I wouldn’t condone such a thing, but some games are just worth breaking copyright law for.

And that’s the end of this week’s article. I probably shouldn’t say that, because these don’t exactly come weekly, but it’s too late to go back and type in something different. Maybe I should try to do an article a week, or at least bi-monthly. Lately I’ve been doing pretty good, with nine submissions so far this year. If you total what I did last year, that a whole lot of crap in two months. I think that this is one of my best articles in a while, because for at least the first half, I concentrated on not actually reviewing, but picking out little things and making big deals out of them, much like one of my many web-heroes would do.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. I know the electron thing made all the difference for me. I think it would be a whole lot funnier if I’d actually made that page, but as it stands, very few people will know what I’m talking about or take the time to read the whole thing and try to understand. I also had fun taking the screenshots for Bust-A-Move, and almost forgot that I was trying to write an article and not trying to finish the game. As a final remark, I’d like to say that after writing this, I’m certainly convinced that I should go out and buy Bust-A-Move. I guess it worked. Ooh! And I even managed to finish with a sweet word count of over 3100!

For you

Two days sick and I have two articles ready for the posting. But I won’t. I said I was gonna do one a week for a while, that’s the way it’s going to be, and since I already posted one this week I won’t be putting the next one up until Sunday. The next one is nice and long too, about 600 words more than my preferred word count. I think it’s pretty good and I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it too. And in other news, the forum is once again “bustling” with activity and even some new members. So make sure to drop by after you’re done reading this. Which should be right about now.

~Ryan out.

Taking my time

After some situation assessment, I’ve dicovered that I have enough junk ready to be done so that I can post one article a week for at least four weeks. That’s a whole March of content, people! Be happy that I’m actually getting into a good groove, and if I can keep finding things that I want to write about, we’ll be good for a long time to come. I’ll be posting a new article every Sunday (or at least sometime on the weekend) until April. And then I don’t know what’s going to happen, so enjoy it while it’s good. I could get used to this “routine” thing. As long as fun things are out there, I shall seek and review them. That shall be my mission. That way, when my site is popular one day, people will have a lot to read when they have nothing else to do.

~Ryan out.

Megavitamin jazz

Today is the first of the month, and to celebrate, I added a couple new links. Actually, I just put them there because I wanted to. The first of March means nothing to me. Really. I should have at least one of two new articles done by the end of the week. Consult the forums for more details, ’cause I don’t wanna write it out twice. All I’ll say is that one will be balancing terribleness with awesomeness, and the other might bring question to my sanity.

~Ryan out.

Quite bitter beings

I might have had this done earlier, but I’ve been doing a lot today. Oh, and I’m talking about my new article, for those of you who hadn’t figured it out. I’ll probably be done another one tomorrow if I can get some time to myself, but given the topic, it’ll probably be kinda short. I really can’t think of anything more that needs saying, so that’s it for today.

~Ryan out.

The Squirrel Game

For the longest time, I was under the impression that The Squirrel Game was one of the greatest board games that I’ve ever played. It was one of my childhood favorites, and I have many a fond memory of playing the game. So, as I did with The Hamburger Game, I told my friends the legend, and whaddya know, one of them just happened to still own it. And then I knew that I would finally get to play this game that I loved so much again. Well, there was only one problem.

As many happy memories of the game that I have, they don’t make up for how bad the game really is. It is truly one of the most confusing and redundant games I’ve ever played. The board is shaped all weird, and every player moves along it in his or her own direction, making progressing a tricky task. Then there’s the goal of the game: to collect pinecones. Why would squirrels want pinecones? I thought they liked acorns. But the way the pinecone collecting system works is very unrefined, and causes much anger in the hearts of the players.

But even after discovering that The Squirrel Game is nowhere near as great as I remember it being, I still wanted to compose an article on this game of yesteryear. Now I could just do a review, but most of my articles lately have been reviews, so this one is gonna play out a bit differently. Again, since I don’t own the game, I didn’t take the pictures. This time though, they are of much better quality, because this time the photographer knew the value of the focus feature. Some are still a bit blurry, but in the end, it’s much better than The Hamburger Game’s pics.

This is a story about a magical day in Carpet Land. Many strange things happen there every day, but this is one story that will put all the others to shame.

One fine day in Carpet Land, a large plastic bag appeared from out of nowhere. Nobody was quite sure what it was, and since the contents were so jumbled up, they couldn’t tell what was in it. The DVD player suggested that perhaps someone should try to open this mysterious bag, but the GameCube controller knew better and told him that they had best leave it alone. So everyone agreed and went back to their daily routines of sitting around unused.

Not long after it arrived, the plastic bag began to rumble and open, as if some giant unseen force were rumbling and opening it. After some ten seconds or so, a small area of forest appeared. It was quite square, and had a winding path going through it. Along with the forest appeared four squirrels, each clad in colourful suspenders. The final thing that appeared was a strange red tub full of pinecones. Nobody was sure what was going to happen, but it seemed as if the squirrels thought they were right at home.

The green squirrel and the yellow squirrel turned out to be a team of sorts, as they quickly put distance between themselves and the other squirrels. After they found a place to set up a small fort, they started talking in hushed voices and looking towards the red tub. Green and yellow were definitely in the mindset that they needed those pinecones, and it they knew that the red and blue squirrels weren’t going to make it easy for them. They knew they were going to have to take them by force.

Meanwhile, red and blue were also conspiring about how to get those pinecones. They also knew that their rivals were going to try to take the pinecones from them. But unlike green and yellow, blue and red were going to try to reason with green and yellow. They were the kinder of the four squirrels, and they didn’t want to have to resort to dirty tricks, so they simply headed out towards the tub.

But green and yellow were one step ahead! While blue and red were busy regrouping, yellow and green had already begun their warfare, and had created an earthquake machine! The machine started up and made some terrible tremors, causing blue and red to fall over! It wouldn’t have been so bad, but their wheelbarrows had fallen too, and squirrels aren’t too strong, so they had a hard time turning them upright again. Those dastardly green and yellow squirrels! What were they planning next?

Suddenly a large deity of sorts descended from the skies. It was simply a hand, and all the squirrels looked up in awe. They had never seen anything like it before. The hand came closer to the ground and suddenly it was apparent that it was holding something! The object was a strange cube with dots and pinecones carved onto all of its sides. The squirrels were mesmerized by the strange object and couldn’t take their eyes off it.

The great hand then dropped the cube without warning and the squirrels all felt compelled to move along the forest path. The hand kept picking up and dropping the cube and the squirrels kept moving along the path. They had no idea why they were doing it, but they kept it up anyway.

As they moved along, they discovered two things. The first was that there were pinecone symbols drawn into the path at certain places, and if they landed on these, some pinecones from the tub magically moved into their wheelbarrows. They each also discovered a secret hole where they could hide any pinecones they acquired. As they kept moving along, they gained more and more pinecones. At one point, green even managed to steal some of blue’s pinecones.

But at that point, green noticed that his wheelbarrow was getting far too heavy to push, and that if he were to acquire any more pinecones, it might tip over and spill them all. So he rushed to his hiding spot as fast as he could, making sure to avoid the pinecone symbols to the best of his ability. He made it there just in the nick of time, as he’d gotten very tired from all that pushing. But then he noticed that his stash had been emptied! What was going down here? Witchery? Kleptomaniacal forest creatures? No, it had to have been those red and blue squirrels.

In a fit of rage, green denied the power of the cube and ran towards the tub with all his might. The other squirrels hadn’t noticed, and they all continued on their merry ways. Though his payload was heavy, green knew that he had to heist the whole tub, or else the others would be able to make off with his pinecones. And that couldn’t happen. Not to green. He knew that yellow was a traitorous bastard, and that he was secretly plotting with red and blue, so he felt no pity for his former partner.

Green got to the tub, pinecones in tow, and only then did he realize that there was no way he could load all of those pinecones onto his wheelbarrow. He sat and thought for a minute and then came up with a plan. He figured that since the tub was so very magical, it wouldn’t be very heavy, and so if he loaded that onto his barrow, he would be able to carry them all.

As magical as it was, the tub was just far too heavy for little green to lift. He tried and tried, but there was no way it was going to happen. He even tried pushing it, but he had very little success, and he didn’t have time to dawdle. In the end, he managed to fall into the tub! Now he was faced with the challenge of getting himself and his barrow out of the tub. After trying very hard, he managed to finally overcome the challenge and escape from the magical dish.

Though he had escaped with his life, green was still unsatisfied. He thought some more, and then it came to him. In the forest, he had seen one place with a symbol of three pinecones. There was nothing else like it anywhere else, so perhaps it was the key to getting all of those pinecones. He rushed back to the forest as quickly as he could in hopes that he had found the secret of the pinecones.

After much searching and stealthily avoiding the other squirrels, green finally found that spot with the triple-pinecone symbol. He moved closer and placed his wheelbarrow over it. Then, to his surprise, he saw the stream of pinecones fly toward him. He had done it! And not only did they come to him, they followed him around too, floating magically in single file.

Green ran back to his hiding spot, with the pinecones in hot pursuit. He almost stepped out right in front of red once, but quickly jumped back into the trees and just barely avoided being seen. As soon as red was out of sight, he continued his trek towards home base. He made it there, and all the pinecones flooded into his hiding spot. He had won! He had all the pinecones to himself! Now that he had them all, he could skip town and head to Closet Land to live the good life.

But then out of nowhere, a giant robot came crushing through the forest! Green turned to run, but the robot was clearly following him! As much as he didn’t want to, he knew that he had to leave the pinecones and save his life. He kept running, but the robot was gaining on him. There was no way he could escape, as the robot was very tall and would be able to see him no matter where he ran.

But then he came to a clearing, and he stopped in shock. In front of him stood the yellow, blue, and red squirrels. They looked very agitated, and green knew that he had been had. He tried to plead for forgiveness, but then the robot appeared and they got frightened and ran away. Green was surprised that they hadn’t been controlling it to get revenge on him, and he just stood there in shock. The robot grabbed him and started shaking him around violently. Green saw the error of his ways, but it was too late. The robot kept up his fierce attack, and green finally passed out.

The robot then threw green to the ground, and started chase after the rest of the squirrels. Yellow tripped on a rock and since red and blue never turned around to look back, they could only presume he was shaken silly. Then the robot managed to catch up and grab red. He squirmed for his life, and blue could only stare in shock as his partner was shaken around ferociously. After the robot was done with red, blue knew he was no match, covered his eyes and curled up into the fetal position.

After a while he noticed that nothing was happening. He opened his eyes, and saw that the robot was gone, along with red. Blue got up and wondered what had just happened. After finding no trace of his friend, blue decided to make the best of a bad situation and took all the pinecones from green’s stash and moved them to his own. Then he laid back and stretched out under the sun and fell asleep.

Since all the other squirrels had disappeared, blue no longer had any worry of losing his precious pinecones. Life was good, and he was the king of the forest. And so ends our little tale of squirrels and pinecones.

Or does it?

I like to think that I pulled that one off pretty well. My English teacher says I should write a graphic novel, and at this point in my life, this is about as close as it gets. Hell, I’m not even sure what a graphic novel is. I guess it’s just a story with pictures, right? Well, in any case, I think the story played out pretty well, even if it did get a little evil near the end. I wasn’t planning on having that happen, but I had to work with what pictures were given to me, and that’s the best I could do.

So just as a little reminder, The Squirrel Game is a very bad game, unless you’re making a little story out of it. If you use the squirrels as toys, it’s all well and good. I actually never planned to do this “review” as a story, but I got sick of the normal review-type stuff. I know it took me a lot less time to do it this way, because it just flows when you’re writing a story, and for reviews you have to pick out certain information, and omit things that aren’t pertinent, and it’s just a lot harder. So I might do more stuff like this in the future too. I enjoyed doing this and Hylian Idol, so there’s definitely potential for more.