Fifty days into the year – Fifty reviews released! It’s been a wild ride so far, and it’s only going to get wilder! Expect plenty of big games receiving reviews, as well as plenty of smaller named, lesser known titles. There’s quite a few changes going on with the project with each passing days. Some to help make content consistently entertaining, without sacrificing any integrity. Some changes are being made to help ease the burden I placed on myself with this project, and to help stay afloat for the next 315 days. During the coming weeks, I will outline more of the changes going on, what’s in, what’s out and in general, what you can expect.

You can stay abreast on all of my reviews and other random oddities by clicking “Jason V.” on the tag cloud to the right,  however I felt that compiling the first fifty days of reviews into a single article would help a little bit more, as you won’t need to change pages in order to see every review. Now you’re just a simple scroll away from each and every review I have done so far! Click the name to visit its corresponding review that you may have missed, want to share with others, or just give another read through! Without further ado, here are the first fifty days of 365//365:

(the five titles listed in bold are the most read reviews and italic are personal favorite reviews I worked on)

001. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
002. Double Dragon 3
003. Ghouls ‘n Ghosts
004. Final Fight Streetwise
005. Castlevania 3
006. Uncharted: Drakes Fortune (most viewed review thus far by quite a few hits)
007. Castlevania: Bloodlines
008. Simpsons Wrestling
009. Mega Man 3
010. Turtles in Time
011. Hyperstone Heist
012. TMNT Reshelled
013. Street Fighter: The Movie
014. Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!
015. Boogerman
016. ET Digital Companion
017. South Park
018. WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2010
019. Jackal
020. Army of Two: The 40th Day
021. Batman Returns
022. Pocket Fighter
023. Crazy Taxi GBA
024. Mario Kart Double Dash
025. Sonic R
026. Guitar Hero 3
027. PaRappa the Rapper
028. George Foreman’s KO Boxing
029. Foreman For Real
030. Castlevania Adventure
031. God of War Collection
032. Maximum Carnage
033. Separation Anxiety
034. Bubble Bobble
035. Mighty Final Fight
036. Final Fight One
037. Power Ranger: The Movie
038. Twisted Metal (ton of hits in under 24 hours)
039. Twisted Metal 2 (best game that week and the least hits that week….weirdos!)
040. Twisted Metal 3
041. Twisted Metal 4
042. Twisted Metal: Small Brawl
043. Rogue Trip
044. Vigilante 8 (PSX Car Combat Week was a pretty big hit with viewers)
045. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
046. Conker’s Bad Fur Day
047. Fighter Maker 2
048. Mario Paint
049. WWF Attitude
050. Uncharted 2

It seems as if more and more people are coming along for the ride as time passes. I hope that you all can spread the word more and bring some more friends along for the ride. I’m having a great time putting together all of these reviews, and it has been quite a challenge to stay consistent with this. Please, if any of you have any questions, comments, or even friendly debates, by all means leave a comment here or on any reviews I post. So long as its constructive and respectful, I will do my best to respond to whatever is posted here.

Once again, I thank you all for following along during the first fifty days of this ambitious project, and I hope that not only have you enjoyed it, but will come along with em for the next 315 days of reviews, and bring your friends as well.  I very much look forward to providing you all with more reviews of past, as well as present game releases.

What I thought back during release….

Awesome! Maximum Carnage is one of the coolest games I’ve ever played! Playing as Spider Man or Venom through this Final Fight like game never gets old. I love how you can call upon random Marvel heroes to aid and assist you through some tough battles. Boss fights are entertaining, though Carnage is hard as hell. Whoever this Green Jelly band is, their music sounds great with the action going on. I wish the difficulty wasn’t so high. Otherwise Maximum Carnage impresses me in so many ways and is worth playing!

Rating Then: 8.4

What I think years later….

Before I even get to the game, I recently discovered that LJN, the undisputed King of Crap in the 8 bit world, published Maximum Carnage. Then again, I enjoyed playing Wolverine on the NES when I first started playing it, so I wasn’t all there sometimes. But now that I found out about LJN having a hand at Maximum Carnage in some form, it makes this Retro Re-Review all the more interesting. I really liked Maximum Carnage, and even had a letter of mine published in Game Players, asking about hidden bonus rooms. It’s been maybe five or more years since I’ve played this one. Will I find the same joy I once found when I was younger, or will this game make me want to dive head first into Cloak’s pits of dimensional hell?

Seconds after I power the game on, that Green Jelly music goes off and nostalgia starts to hit me. For a cart, I thought that Maximum Carnage did a commendable job at producing quality music to go with the action in the game. Even today, the intro music sounds great. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

The game opens with some quality comic book story board art, which from what I remembered from the actual comic series, does Mark Bagley’s art justice. Very clean, well detailed. Extremely impressive for 16 bit standards. After a lengthy amount of these, I jump right into the game.

Mark Bagley's art translate to a near perfection, with quite a bit of detail faithfully ported over.

Movement feels loose enough. Attacking is quite quick and simple. I can pull enemies to me, tie them up in web, shield myself and if timed right, I can grab an enemy on either side of me with my webbing, and pull them together for a nice thud. I even remember how to pull off my strong attack that lowers my health with each use. There’s even a dedicated web swinging button. Quite easy to get into, whether you’re new or coming back for a long absence. Attacks are easy to get off, work well enough, and its fun.

While enemies look decent and the background looks pretty good, Spider Man himself looks weird. Looks like he has breasts, and his elbows are perfectly rounded. He looks really silly in general. While the normal thugs do look decent, they are recycled way too often. Why do I have to fight four trench coat thugs with four different color trench coats and four different color spiked hairdos? Are they related or something? Same thing with the triplets with backwards baseball caps in different colors, sunglasses and bulls-eye shirts with different colors. Variation is severely lacking here. Stuff like that never really phased me back in the days, mostly because repetition was quite normal.

I can't be the only one that notices some similarities between the trench-coat clad enemies of Maximum Carnage and the hoodie wearing ones in Final Fight. The hair, glasses, stance....

Despite the early criticism about some cheap AI tactics, this is still as fun as I remembered. The music is so well done throughout. I’ve never heard of Green Jelly before I played Maximum Carnage, and I’ve never heard of them since. Thank goodness they existed though, cause their music has helped the game flow along well and has fit in perfectly overall.

I’m a few levels past the first two now. I’ll be honest….it’s feeling quite repetitive right now. Sound effects are starting to come off as low grade and cheap. Why does it make a weird sound, like I’m banging the inside of an oil drum with a tree branch, when I shoot my web and tie someone up? When I beat an enemy, he gives the same death yell as I give when I lose a life. It’s all recycled way too much. Not to mention that I have yet to see any different looking thugs, other than the first level boss now appearing, with 1/20 of the health she had when we first fought. When you die, you have the option of continuing the game, but it takes you right back to the beginning of the level. That means I have to clear the same names, the same faces, the same recycled enemies once again. That sucks.

The classic take on grabbing two enemies at once for the meeting of the minds. It's a shame it's so difficult to get off on a consistent basis.

I’ve yet to fight a villain from the Marvel Universe other than a 10 second encounter with Doppelganger, who’s barely had any impact in the comic world, and that’s it. I have not even seen where the super hero assistance icons are. Hell, finding health replenishment is next to impossible as well, as they rarely drop off enemies when you need them, and rarely pop up in the background as you advance. This game is just brutal.

So I finally get past the point where I had to continue. I get to the boss and….it’s a fat guy with a blackjack and a tattoo. I seem to remember Marvel Superheroes and villains making appearances in this game. Maybe I was playing Spider Man & The X-Men: Arcade’s Revenge? But seriously, this is getting beyond the point of monotony. So I beat him, and what, two more?! Come on! I’m seriously considering giving up right here. So as soon as I type that, I get knocked down, and the most magical thing happened….CLOAK AND DAGGER APPEAR! So I’ll give this a little more time before dismissing the rest of the game.

Where the heck are all the super villains? Why am I constantly fighting no named baddies in place of villains from the comic series?

The further I play, the more I lose sight of why I loved this game as much as I did. It looks decent still, the music is definitely the show stealer, and the comic book story board scenes look really well done. But this is becoming borderline painful. After an annoying boss battle between Shriek and Doppelganger (two nobodies in the Marvel Universe) I can choose between continuing as Spider Man, or pick Venom. At this point, I totally forgot that Venom was available later in the game. I’m going to give him a chance and see how things develop.

Venom is as fast as Spider Man with stronger attacks. But this is the same exact thing. Same thugs, same cheap tactics. I found a Secret Room by bashing buttons near an ATM. Luckily you can win 1-ups in these rooms, which go a long way to helping you kill even more recycled enemies. So I finally reach the end of the stage. Who’s the boss, you ask?

Yeah. Forget this.

I really must have had some thick skin as a kid. I some how tuned out all of the repetition, all the recycled garbage, all of the painfully generic enemies and called this game awesome. Sure, the music is excellent, but I’d rather just download music rips of the game listen to it while I slam my bedroom door against my head for five minutes straight. Maximum Carnage is not worth the time investing if you’ve never played the game, and it’s not even worth anymore of my time to find actual super villains or heroes that people actually care about. Although it’s still the best LJN game I’ve played by far, that doesn’t really say much. It’s actually quite depressing to come back to a game I so fondly loved, and see how many glaring faults it really had.

Vemon secretly wishes he was shouting "GARBAGE!"

Rating Now: 4.4

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What I thought back during release….

Being a fan of Ninja Turtles cartoon and movies, this isn’t a very faithful game, but man it’s fun. The turtles all play the same but with a different range of attack and damage spread, but the action is fast and intense. Maybe one of the hardest games I have ever played as well. Right from the get go, I’m being challenged and pushed to extremes. I just wish that the jumping was more precise, and the later stages weren’t so overwhelmingly difficult. Nitpicking aside, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a seriously challenging game that’s very addictive and entertaining.

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Rating Then: 8.3

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What I think years later….

TMNT has been the subject of ridicule for a number of reasons. James Rolfe of Angry Video Game Nerd fame thought it was a god awful abomination of a game. Many have complained about the infamous seaweed portion of the second stage as being nearly impossible and unnecessary. While I know the game was extremely difficult, I felt that a lot of the panning it has received as of late was unjustified. It’s been years since I’ve played the game, but I’m going into this with fond memories of a fun game with a good look, great music and some of the most difficult stages I had ever played in a video game. Will I find the same enjoyment I found all those years back, or am I in for a shell shock?

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I never really noticed until now that the mood and the look are grimier and darker than the animated series. That’s where most of us first learned of the Ninja Turtles. Most of us didn’t know about the comics, which were more violent and far from the kid friendly party animals we grew up with. The “over-world” has the same ugly deformed characters with simple looking buildings and scenery. Going inside the sewers or buildings, I immediately see a total lack of colors being used. Lots of purple and green abound. The turtles themselves look detailed enough and distinguishable, though just barely. Backgrounds are as simplistic, but workable, as I remembered. I just can’t get over all these freaky looking enemies that never appeared in the animated series. So many flying things and weird upside down ceiling bobbers. There’s really not much here that represents the cartoon.

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Each turtle has their signature weapon, but as always, there’s no reason to ever play anyone but Leonardo and Donatello. They have the best range and damage to their attacks, with Donatello being able to attack an enemy that’s close to his back. The only reason I ever used Raphael and Michelangelo was to go across the harder parts of the game where I had to actually take damage, or the over-world in case an enemy hits me.

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Raphael sucks. No getting around this.

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It’s everything I remembered, up until the second level. This is where frustration starts to set in. Now I remember a few jumps being a huge pain to clear, but I didn’t remember where exactly they were. Right before you exit out of the building to get to the top of the dam, you find your first hair pulling jumping segment. The problem is that jumping has a couple of variables – how long you hold the button down and if there is a ceiling above you. Hold the jump button too long with a ceiling above you, and you hit it and drop down short of the other side. If you don’t hold the jump button long enough, you under jump the gap. This comes up several times and is something I remember quite well. I had to attempt a jump over twenty times to clear it. By the time I was able to get to the other side, Donatello was dead, Raphael and Michelangelo have one unit of health and Leonardo has half a life bar.

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One of the reasons why the health on all my turtles is that low is because every time I kill an enemy and advance the screen, if I come back to that same screen, the enemies all respawned. So if I cleared the bottom to the right so I can climb the ladder to walk back to the left across the top, all the enemies I killed when walking by, have magically respawned. So if I miss that jump, I fall back down, have to clear the enemies once again, take some hits, and try once more.

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Now we come to the infamous seaweed section. I remember having trouble here and there, but it was never so severe that I wanted to burn down Ultra Games’ headquarters. My first attempt was to get a feel for it all again, which is almost impossible when one turtle is dead, two have one bar of health and the last one is half dead. Might as well give up and get back to this point. For my second attempt, everyone but Mike is full health. I clear the first 4 bombs without getting touched more than once, which forced me to switch to Raphael. Full health until I got to this part -

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I remember back in the days how I could navigate through this patch without taking more than two hits on average. Now I'm lucky not to kill three turtles per attempt.

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Within seconds, I go from full health (8 units) to near death (2 units). I used to be able to navigate that with only two hits landing. Granted its been years since I’ve done this, that’s just insane! Then there’s this part -

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All of this madness, and you're only in the second stage of the game.

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There’s a patch of seaweed before this, where if you touch it, it’s an instant death. So not only do I have to stay high, but I also have to not stay too high or else I get hit, but the timer is running down. It’s just a crazy series of events culminating into a sped up musical feed and you rushing to the last bomb before it blows up. It’s hectic if anything, and yes, you take a ton of unnecessary damage since you’re rushing through, but it’s not a game breaker. Just a patch of annoyance.

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I have to say though, the music is still really good. No theme song from the TV series is present, but the music selection available is catchy and quite memorable. There’s not a ton of variation between the all, but its as good as its ever been.

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The repetition of clearing your way to one side and having to re-clear because you fell short of your jump starts to lay in thick. When you get past that one jump and onto another section, there’s the sewer section where the spacing between platforms, along with the platforms themselves start to shrink, making jumping a treacherous hell.

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You know what's going to happen 93% of the time you attempt that jump?

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Frustration really starts to set in now. I really don’t remember that many jumps being a hassle. The respawning enemies are quite annoying, especially with no connection to the Ninja Turtle canon from what I can tell. Maybe if I saw more of what looked like Foot Soldiers from the first stage, and Mousers from that first stage as well, I wouldn’t feel like this is overly monotonous.

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You fall into the water. How they can swim through an underwater section filled with electric seaweed and electric bolts, yet missing a jump in the sewers sends them back to the start of the section, I don't know.

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I’m having fun with the game though. The problem is it seems like I downplayed how many jumping problems there were back when I first played this. The seaweed wasn’t that bad, but there are way too many jumps that are infuriating. The further I progress, the difficulty seems based more off jump timing and the subsequent retries and re-clearing. The boss battles go from simplistic (stay up on the crates and hold down while pressing B to attack Rocksteady with no worries) to multi tiered madhouse battles (the Technodrome’s several stept battle, which begs the question “Why is the Technodrome in a 1:100,000 scale to the cartoon Technodrome?”) The last stages are a circus of astronaut looking enemies shooting laser beams at you, with corridors that lead you to constant dead ends.

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was one of the first five titles I received when I got my Nintendo for Christmas back in 90 or 91. I’ve had fond memories of this game for many many years, and after playing it for the first time in quite a while, I feel sort of let down. What I played before was a fun game with some frustrating moments. While that thought still stands, I feel a lot more frustrated than I ever did before, and the cheap respawning enemy bit became tiresome. I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s one of the weakest NES games I’ve played. It may not be the cartoon based game you wanted, nor is it the game I remembered from years back, but it’s still worth adding to your collection.

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Rating Now: 7.3

Little Nemo: The Dream Master is a cutesy looking game that’s deceptively difficult. Transforming into different creatures really gives the game a unique twist to the genre. The difficulty is pretty high up there, and sometimes unforgiving to the player. The best part comes during the final stages, where you unlock a magic wand to shoot down enemies. Characters and backdrops are bright, detailed and well colored, with a soundtrack that’s fitting for the action going on. I wish that not only could I save the game, but the game wasn’t so difficult at times. Still though, Little Nemo: The Dream Master is a fun game, but one that needs patience over anything else.

Rating Then: 7.3

Make sure you throw three pieces of candy at the playable creatures BEFORE you jump on them, or else these "friendly" characters will hurt you.

What I think years later….

Little Nemo: The Dream Master. A game that looks so very childish, until you actually grabbed the controller, and it just knocked your socks off at some parts. All the creatures that you can turn into gave you different abilities. Some were cool, and some were very limited. Once you get to the final world (if you could make it that far) you get your magic wand, and I remember that being pretty damn fun. Little Nemo is closing in on being a twenty year old video game. Back in the days, I remember it being a good title, with a great look and some equally engaging tunes to go along with your journey. But how about today? Is that journey through Nemo’s dream worlds still provide nightmarish difficulties at points? Will you lose any sleep over Little Nemo being nothing like you remembered it to be?

I’m welcomed back with that charming opening theme loop, with the same great story unraveling opening cut scenes that I remembered. Going in game, you talk to Jiminy Cricket’s bastard son, Flip, letting you know that this is not a place for little kids….oh but if you’re staying, here’s a couple tips! So after Flip offs, you start playing. Wow….how I have forgotten so much of the gameplay.

With many different creatures you can turn into, or even ride, Donkey Kong here is one of the most well rounded.

Jumping doesn’t go very high, and your only offense as Nemo involves throwing candy at enemies to stun them, while he has a big wand strapped to his back nonetheless. Trying to jump on enemies makes you lose one unit of health. You have to find certain creatures in each stage to feed your candy to, wait for them to blow a snot bubble, and then jump on them, where you transform into them. But be sure you wait for them to blow that bubble, or else you’ll take damage from them. I just had a moment where I not only jumped into a mole creature thing just a split second before the snot bubble came up, losing my last unit of health, yet changing into the mole, and dying again, all happening one after another. Right after that, I’m placed into a situation where I die almost immediately after respawning.

It’s 3 minutes in, and I’m already at the point of chucking my controller against the wall.

After my first Game Over screen, I go at it once more. After I’ve got the hang of the first stage, I feel a bit more comfortable. Each creature you capture has a certain perk or two that helps you find every key you need to unlock the next stage. You can belly flop stomp them with the toad creature, but you need to be precise with your landing. Belly first or you lose health. Certain creatures have longer health bars than others, none of which are 100% full when you capture one. Frogs can stomp enemies, jump twice as high and swim faster. Mole creatures can dig underground for keys, but cannot jump. Donkey Kong can throw a really short ranged punch, climb walls and has six units of health, but can’t jump very high. You’ll quickly learn that you will have to use almost every variation of creatures in some form to get every key and advance to the next stage.

If you can persevere long enough, you can even capture freaking Diddy Kong, and cartwheel yourself through your enemies!

On paper, that’s all fine and dandy. The problem back in the days was the brutal difficulty of the game sort of hampering that innovation and fun. Even today, Little Nemo is a hard as nails game, to the point of being infuriating. This might be one of the first titles I can remember playing all those years back, where I encountered cheap death after cheap death. It’s a big shame too, as this game has so much going for it.

Two big things that work well for it is the audio and video components. The music is varied, clear and very engaging. It has a perfect feeling for each stage. In fact, it’s one of Capcom’s better soundtracks in the 8-bit era. Sound effects work out well, sounding a bit kiddy here and there. That fits the look of it, however, with the difficulty level where it is, it may not work for most. As with the sound effects, the game looks very kiddy. Some stages have very bright colors, cartoon looking creatures and what not. I discovered ten years ago that Little Nemo was actually a comic strip from the very early 1900′s and made into a movie in the late 80′s. It was a fantasy world with a lot of fantasy and youthful undertones, so that’s why Capcom’s adaptation looks and sounds the way it does. But why is the game so damn hard? Was the comic strip written in hieroglyphics, with a blind man that translated them and wrote the code?

As mentioned earlier, Little Nemo: The Dream Master’s biggest issue is still the infuriating difficulty. With practice, you can possibly clear stages without losing a life, but as you progress, the amount of practice you’ll need with increase significantly. Back in the days, 8-bit generation titles were hard as nails. Today, they still are, for the most part. However, many games balance the difficulty well, and were designed with difficulty in mind. But with Little Nemo, simple things were programmed very poorly. Barely making jumps over enemies when you’re without a companion, small invulnerability window between hits causing  easy deaths, overly punishing level designs that encourage exploration yet detour you out of fear of easy deaths, and so on. There’s way too many unnecessary headaches, more than I ever remembered. Try and get through that God forsaken train ride without dying your first several attempts.

Ultimately, if you can endure pain worse than Chinese water torture, and have enough patience to take your time with your actions, Little Nemo: The Dream Master is still a worthwhile addition to the NES game library. The look is very unique (although highly bizarre at points), the music is very well done, and there’s enough diversity between the creatures you can use.  What makes this dream a big time nightmare is gameplay execution. You simply have to take your time, all the time. Luckily, you can continue as many times as you want, so long as you don’t hit the power button. But damn….

If I had to star in a video game with death all around me, nothing but wrapped candy in my weapons arsenal, allies that can't swim, low height on my jumps and a magic wand on my back all game that I can't use until the last stage, I'd wet the bed too.

Rating Now: 6.7

** Note – I may or may not have my next Retro Re-Review set for next Friday. If I do not, my apologies, as I’m preparing for a trip.  I’ll either get that out before I leave or a couple days after I get back. If I have it ready before I leave (good chance) I’ll set the scheduling here to post it on the normal day and time I have all my RRR posted.

Rating Then: 8.0

What I think years later….

Rampage has had a soft spot in my heart for many years, even though I have not really played it in such a long time. Lazy summer afternoons spent punching the piss out of buildings, eating pedestrians, and just running a muck because I could! Such a simple premise – destroy every building on the stage, move onto the next stage, rinse and repeat. Simple, yet engaging. It kept me busy for hours on end for so many days, and I ate it all up. But what about now? Does Rampage still satisfy an all day rampage through city after city and still reign as a premiere NES title, or did all those long summer days with no air conditioning melt my brain all those years back?

Never eat the toilet bowls....

....if you do, you blow chunks.

Jumping right into the game and past the uneventful opening screen, I am thrown right into work, taking buildings down. Okay, so let me jump onto a building with A….ah hell, I forgot this was one of those games with the backwards controls. B is jumping, while A is attacking. With that out of the way, now I get to work. Boy, color variation was definitely not a focal point here in Rampage. Ugly green, gray and blue variations are abound. It’s quite an ugly game for NES standards, and a little worse than I remember.

This is one of those games with one or two music bytes, tops. You hear basically the same music, over and over, throughout your play through, with the only variation coming when Lizzie drops down after every half dozen stages to punch the area on the US map you just went though, and ‘destroy’ it. It’s not WinBack bad, but it’s really annoying after a while. In fact, mixed with the uneventful sound effects, you’d miss nothing if you muted your television while playing this game.

One reason why Rampage had a lot of replay value for me back in the days, was because death had no consequences. You lose all your health? No problem! Just press B and you’re back in the hunt! Although I have to admit, with no actual important back story to the game, seeing George and Lizzie transform into humans upon losing all your health is odd. Pressing B and watching them grow back to their full size King Kong and Godzilla rip off look alike stature is just as odd.

When your health fully depletes, you turn into a human being, and shuffle off to the side of the screen. Press B and you magically grow back to your original state.

As I’m getting further and further into my play through, I’m starting to get really bored. All I’m doing is punching down different sized buildings, with a color palette as varied as Pong, eating toilets and poisoning myself, jumping off buildings before they crumble with me on it, getting shot up constantly by guys hanging out windows with guns, choppers doing flybys on me, tanks slowly driving by, Ecto 1 shooting me off buildings (yes….it’s freaking Ecto 1 car from the Ghostbusters movies does a drive-by on you) and none of it is really much fun after ten levels. Why was this fun nearly twenty years ago?

Who you gonna call?! KONGBUSTERS!

Then there’s also some major issues with controls and collision detection. Climbing a building seems like a game of Chance….you press Up where you should, and your character just stands there, often times getting shot while doing so. You seem to have to be in the most pixel perfect position to get yourself to climb the building. Trying to grab enemies walking on the ground is a chore too, as you need to have your punch land squarely on top of them in order to grab them. Easier said than done. When you’re climbing up a building and punch upward at a chopper coming down, you can hit it from a near mile away. At the same time, choppers dropping a missile down at you can literally graze your face, and yet not connect and damage you. Very sloppy stuff.

If there was one thing that could have saved Rampage, and definitely made me have a higher view of the game, it would have to be a save system. This is one title that could have benefited immensely from having a battery backup saving system, or even one of those god awful password systems a lot of NES titles had. This way, I could come back at a later time to continue my madness, and not feel as over burdened by how severely repetitious this all feels. In fact, I probably would have rated this game a full point higher if it had this feature. Sadly, I’d have to use save states via emulation on my PC if I ever wanted to do that, which I really can’t be bothered to.

Rampage does have its moments, unfortunately, they all come early on, before you realize how monotonous and repetitious the game really is. You can almost say that this game is a bad comedy, with bad jokes between stages, that you can make even worse jokes off of it. For NES standards, it was a lot more repetitious than most of the titles in the library, a lot less visually appealing, and definitely not the game I remember so fondly. I think its safe to say that Rampage is one of those titles that you should always remember from years ago as a title you had a good time with, and never try to relive those days ever again. If you HAVE to come back and relive these days again, do so in short spurts, via emulation, with a save state after ten levels or so. Come back a week later maybe, and repeat. Otherwise, it’s way too much of the same thing way too often.

That's what she said!

Rating Now: 5.0

Kick ass game! One of the best 8 bit soundtracks I have ever heard, mixes perfectly with the action going on. On the subject of action, there’s rarely a slow moment, and nearly every second you’re in the middle of a fight. Not the longest game in the world, but it was tough enough where you’d rarely see the end on a consistent level. I just wish there was two players simultaneous action, and maybe a little more length to the game. Also, the number of glitches in this game, one being a potential  “game breaker” are baffling, although more or less every glitch is intentionally brought on. Otherwise, Double Dragon on the NES is a ton of fun and one of the premiere titles on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Rating Then: 8.3

Double Dragon was quite a glitchy game. So glitchy, that if I go any higher up, I can walk above and out of the screen and make these chicks glitch around!

What I think year later….

When I got my NES as a Christmas present several hundred years ago, I  had five games to go along with it – Super Mario Bros. 2, Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link, Metal Gear, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and finally Double Dragon. I remember spending quite a bit of time with the latter title, and how much fun I had. Not knowing what I learned many years later, Double Dragon was far from arcade perfect. However, it was extremely fun, and has become an almost timeless classic. But after all these years, does this timeless classic still clock in a good time? With the expansive NES library, how does it hold up to so many other classics on the system?

So many questions are raised by this picture - Why is there color variations of enemies here that never appear in game? Who is the blue haired Lee brother? Is she bothered by a stomach ache?

Right off the bat, I get that reminder about how awesome this game was — the theme music. It feels so fitting to this game, like how the Rocky theme is so fitting to the Rocky movie. You get that adrenaline rush, and just want to beat down baddies right away! Starting the game, the opening scene made me think back to where I once thought violence towards women started, when Billy’s squeeze gets gut punched and carried away by no named thugs. I was 10 or 11 back then, so I forgive my stupidity some.

Double Dragon is one game that you can jump back into, and feel like you haven’t lost a beat. It’s not just summed up by the fact that it’s on a 25 year old system — this game was still a bit complex for its time. With a punch and kick button, which can both be pressed to jump and when you have the skill, jump kick, easy character movement and enough simplicity in where you go, it’s easy enough to get into. However, the attacks you unlock make you think what is the best attack for who. Early on, you won’t have to deal with what attack is best for who, as you only have punch combos and kick combos, with a kickless jump.

Level 2 Gitch! Step 1: With a bat in hand, approach the side of the screen enough to lure the enemies out, with the top guy positioned like the shot above, then climb up the fence and move left.

Step 2: Walk all the way to the left and climb down the fence halfway, climb back up and walk back over to where you lured the henchman.

Double Dragon looks very good, and even with such a vast library of titles, its still one of the better looking titles. There’s a lot of different animations you come across, and it gives a very distinct feeling of diversity. You can throw two kicks, grab the enemy by the hair and give three knees, toss them over your shoulder, walk over to them and mount them for a few punches, all with a very clean and distinct look. Backgrounds are not plain, generic and overly simplistic. There’s enough variation from scene to scene (minus the cave areas) for you to take notice. I never noticed little wall deformities like in the screen shot above, until I played it again years later. There’s a lot of attention to detail here, even for an 8 bit title.

I dunno if this is even possible, but Double Dragon’s soundtrack seems like its even better than I ever remembered. Each stage has such a fitting and foot tapping sound. Not one stage has a disappointing musical piece. One of the all time greatest gaming soundtracks ever, even to this day. Other sounds throughout the game do their job, although it’s nothing spectacular, like that damn good music.

The difficulty ramps up quite a bit after you enter the first cave section in the third stage. I remember how pissed I would get on the total randomness of the spikes falling, and how big of a pain it was to navigate through without dying. That is still a problem for me, and still as frustrating. It’s about the only time you’ll ever wish for a dash of some sort. There’s some iffy timing platform jumping in the caves, as well as annoying drops down. Then there’s that bit with the walls shooting out at you and knocking you down. Definitely a hair puller. Not to mention that there are no continues in Double Dragon, so that adds to some frustration.

Step 3: Use said bat to rapidly whack away where the henchman used to be for the next 2 minutes.

Step 4: ??? Step 5: Profit, in the form of elbow strikes while not even halfway through the game!

Double Dragon had a couple of memorable glitches, as outlined by several of my screen caps. The stage 1 glitch shown in the first screen cap is pretty much useless, whereas the level 2 skill max out could almost be a “game breaker” as it gives you the powerful attacks that you don’t fully unlock until the last couple of stages (step by step shown through a series of four caps above). Also, some extremely hard to pull of glitches help make the next couple of fights a but easier. It involves swinging or picking up a weapon at a split second timing with the thumbs up that pops up to signify that you can advance forward. Finally, one of the more well known glitches involves skipping the stage 2 “boss” completely, by luring him out of the doorway, and proceeding to climb down two ladders, tricking the game into thinking he fell of a cliff or something, and ending the stage.

Nearly 20 years after its release, Double Dragon is still one of the great classic games on any system. Even with some sketchy jumps, ramped difficulty and some aggravating environmental attacks, its still an extremely fun play through, and is definitely among the elite list of 8 bit titles. After all this time, you’ll still want to crank your volume up and fight it out through one of gamings all time greatest soundtracks. In some ways, I feel like Double Dragon aged better than many games that have come along the way in the last 25+ years.

Oh, by the way Fred Savage, it wasn’t that hard to do back when I was 10, and it still isn’t hard to do today….

"Fifty thousand? ....you got fifty thousand on Double Dragon?!"

Rating Now: 9.2

For one upcoming review, I’ll be recruiting the help of Mr. Chocolate (Phire) with a video of a partial play through, although I’d love to also have a video with Mr. Lemon (Justin) as well, but he’s off globetrotting and making grown men cry. The “Lemon” part should clue you in on what the game MIGHT be. This one will be tentatively released either after I get back, or early August, all depending on when a recording can happen.

The RPG review I am working on may turn into a two part piece. I’m fiddling with the thought of how I’d like to approach this in my head right now. If it is in two parts, expect part one to be dedicated to how I saw the game when I first played it, as well as the subsequent feelings throughout the years. Part two will be a direct review of how I thought of it today. Once I get a working copy going to take on the road with me, I’ll start playing. I’m sure most of you might guess the title, even without me dropping hints. It’s a bit of a massive undertaking, as I really don’t want to be bothered trying to play through this one again, but I’m taking one for the team. My only actual clue about what the game will be is this – what I thought about this title for a long time, would make thousands of GameFAQS kids cry.

This months RRR are tentatively as follows (not counting  the 7/03 release) -

• an old game ported from the arcade to the NES, with where toilets can be lethal
• a sequel to a Super Nintendo game, that was a sequel to an Nintendo game
• a Capcom platformer that was powered by uniqueness, that STILL has no sequel
• an NES masterpiece that had many influences, from Double Dragon, to Final Fantasy

Stay tuned to CL Gamer for more RRR, and other reviews in general. Stay up to date with what I have done by clicking the “Galarian” tag in the cloud located to the right side!

I dunno how this relates to what I just wrote, but awwwwwwwww, how cute!

Winback is a flawed, yet fun experience. The cover system is truly a unique spin to the third person shooter genre, allowing me to hunch up on a wall, and peer around the corner for some safe shooting. Characters look good enough, and scenery is varied enough. The one thing about the graphics that bothers me is the amount of fog, and how hard it is to see enemies very far away. The difficulty is definitely ramped up there, especially if you try and play a “run and gun” style. The things that pull this game down a few notches is weapon variety is severely lacking, and repetition sets in thick with the cover system. Even though emphasis in on taking your time and using your cover, Winback feels like it relies too heavily on that aspect. Regardless, it’s a fun play through and a challenge to most gamers.

Rating Then: 6.7

Judo CHOP!

What I think years later….

This Winback re-review was brought on by a comment made by Nozdeuce in my first RRR, Die Hard Trilogy. This was not a title in my queue, however, I made an exception to add it and bump it up to release on this day, as it was a game I do remember. My memories of the game are mixed, however I do remember enjoying my time playing it, for the most part. For all intended purposes, the cover system serves as one of the most memorable precursor to games such as Kill.Switch, which was also a precursor to Gears of War. Auto aim helped make the game have a better flow, especially with aim precision. It was far from perfect, but I did have a good time with it, and even bought it when it came out on the PS2. My first time playing this game was nearly ten years ago. How does it stack now against other third person shooters in its generation, and was I perhaps a bit too favorable towards Winback as a whole?

I’m already off to a bad start. I remember the lack of any voice acting, something that wasn’t very practical or realistic on a cartridge from a company other than Capcom. That was fine, as the age text barriers was slowly being dismantled. What made me gag, and what I had totally forgotten about, was that music. This is based off the title screen cut scenes too, which, now that I remember, doesn’t vary much from the in game soundtrack. At least things look somewhat faithful to what I remember way back when, right down to the low draw distance.

What I didn’t expect whatsoever, was how I was re-introduced to the game after pressing start. You see a plane flying, and the camera pans through it, and pauses for a moment (I kid you not) at the name on the plane –

ALL ABOARD! SCAT flight number 2-4-1 departing from Poop Creek, OR. Destination: Marked Tree, AR.

Yeah.

So after drop out SCAT (sorry), you begin to play the game. As with most games I have not played in ages, I forget what button does what. Regardless, I march forward, all four steps, where the game auto walks you to the side of a crate, and an enemy on the other side. Alright, I figure out how to wall cover. Once I get that out of the way, I set up my shot. Whoops! I snapped out of cover and am standing out in the open like a fool. So I duck behind the crate in front of me as the enemy runs up to me and decks me, taking nearly 2/3 of my health, which results in a lagged and annoying hit animation. That animation has to run its course, which is about two long seconds of over dramatization. I run back and away, and he magically hit me from four feet away from the melee blow, killing me. A second try at the same scenario and I seem to have got my groove back, in a near expert-like maneuver, I hide behind the cover, roll out, and pop about four caps into him.

Too bad the roll I did was unintentional. But hey, it looked pretty damn sweet.

Your aim, while the button is held, automatically tacks onto the closest enemy. From there you can aim your laser sight around to target body parts, though sensitivity is a bit excessive.

Control wise, its never been complex, but its never been something you can jump into and master in seconds. Something that I’m noticing that I don’t ever recall happening….the cover system doesn’t always work. What I mean is that I can be right near a very large barrier of some sort, and no matter how close I am, or how I press the buttons, I won’t take up the cover. Not only does this happen with large walled areas, but even small crates that can be ducked behind and leaned on. Right now for every ten attempts, four of those tries won’t let me take cover. Very aggravating to say the least.

Not even 3 minutes in, the audio will start to piss you off. It’s like there’s one music track in the game, and it does nothing but loop. The only variation is based off your current health. You’ll want to have laser precision, and avoid any and all damage taken. If you don’t the music starts to speed up, reminding you how much you suck and annoying you so much, it makes you want to take a death just to shut it up. The sound effects are beyond generic. Gun fire, enemies grunting and whatnot when shot, and nothing much in between. You can probably play this with headphones on, blasting the theme to Sponge Bob Square Pants and ou won’t be missing anything crucial, or outstanding.

You have three options here: a) Find health fast .. b) Take a death so you can spare yourself from stabbing your ears .. c) Put on your kids favorite Barney music CD to drown the games music out.

After a while….actually about the same time you discover how unholy the music is, you start to notice how plain Jane the game looks. Trees look out of place, some wall textures look pretty weak, and distant enemies are hard to make out. Draw distance is hampered in part to a fog in the background. This makes the visibility up ahead very poor. A lot of the time, enemies will be coming from around corners and other close by areas, but the point is that you really cannot many anything out from afar. For the N64, it really wasn’t that horrible, but it was far from the prettiest title in the library.

Winback can also be a very punishing game. If you don’t use cover, you will die repeatedly. You need to be sure that you don’t take your sweet time killing enemies either, as some have a tendency to rush forward and give you the butt of death with their guns. Later on, you’ll encounter parts where you need to pass through lasers that are deadly to the touch. Very frustrating because it’s hard to judge its height against your character, making evasion and bypassing too tricky for its own good.

You seet that gun? This will be your best friend throughout Winback, since there's infinite ammo for it, and your other weapons have really poor ammo drops throughout the game.

All together, I can describe a average play through of Winback as robotic. Walk a little, enemies pop out, take cover, have said cover work only a portion of the times attempted. pop out for pot shots, kill, rinse and repeat. The characters feel robotic, the world feels robotic, the controls feel like a broken down robot sometimes, and the music….well that’s not robotic. More like regurgitated.

It what seems like a dominant trend through the first four RRR, it seems like these games I once saw in a more positive manner, just seem very weak now. Well, Bubsy 3D was never positive — it blew hard when I played it. Although Winback is not such a pitiful excuse of a game like Bubsy 3D is, it’s not even close to feeling like a decent experience. As a stealth game, it fails, as stealth kills and opportunities are too few and far between, whereas games like Metal Gear Solid run rings around this title. As a shooting game, the cover system, which is good when it work, slows the pace down considerably. It’s hard to properly define and label Winback in any other way, aside from “bland”. I think the best thing I could say about this one, is how it serves as one of the memorable stepping stone to cover systems that are present in games such as Kill.Switch, 007: Quantum of Solace, Gears of War, and Terminator: Salvation.

Rating Now: 4.9

One of the worst games to have ever been released. Controls are horribly flawed and it looks absolutely dreadful. Star Fox has more believable models than this game and probably better texture. Quite possibly one of the worst games I have ever played to date. Bubsy 3D is so bad, that I honestly never played a good portion of the game, mainly because it was virtually unplayable. From stiff jumping, to absurd movements all around. As a whole, I can’t name even one title worse than Bubsy 3D, and I’ve played some duds (Fantastic Four PSX, Seicross NES, Urban Champion NES).  Bubsy 3D is poster child of “lack of quality control”, as well as a few other words, but they are all four lettered, and as much as it describes Bubsy 3D, I won’t use them.

Rating Then: 2.5

Is he falling? Is he hanging on? Is he jumping? Or is this an optical illusion, and everything is ground level?

What I think years later….

So instead of a game I thought was awesome, or a game that disappointed me big time, I’ll be visiting a game that just plain sucked. Bubsy 3D is not always the first title that pops into someones head right away when they think “horrible, travesty of a game”. From everything I remember, it should be at the top of everyone’s list. With absolutely no redeeming quality, you’d be hard pressed to find any title that would come close to this abomination. But it’s been several years since I played this one, and by played, I mean cried like a little girl from the torture. Was Bubsy 3D a victim of my over criticism? Is it humanly possible that I might find some sort of enjoyment from this game?

Lets start with load times. PSX games were based off 2x CD ROM technology, so there’s some load times in every game. Bubsy 3D is much different though. Load times were built long enough to graduate college in between loads. So after waiting for what seems like a few months, you finally get into the game. Man, I forgot how disgustingly bad this game looked. Bubsy himself looks passable, and it seems like 90% of the polygon count went to creating him. Bubsy’s animations range from decent enough (standing/idle animations) to just horrible (4 frame run animation). Enemies look down right sad, almost like Looney Tunes rejects. There’s no detail anywhere, just slightly different shadings to make the world seem like it has a shape. Really, what kind of world is Bubsy supposed to be in? There’s no definition to anything. The only way I can tell that there’s an underwater area is the fact that the textures get darker when you go into stage that’s set “underwater”. Sometimes you see what appears to be grass tile, but right next to it, there’s a bright orange tile, like a giant chess board.

That’s what the experience of Bubsy 3D as a whole reminds me of — Chess. You (the pawn) blindingly spending money to purchase this from the retailer (the Crook) and end up running to a church for a consult (from the bishop) to repent for supporting Accolade (the king) and to keep you from punching yourself in the mouth until you spit your teeth out (the checkmate).

So far, this is worse than what I remembered.

I bet if I didn't tell you this was an underwater screen cap, you wouldn't have ever known.

Can’t say much about the audio. Mostly because its sparse and silly. The music playing through the very first stages sound like a MIDI remix of the Addams Family theme song. Sound effects are hollow and over emphasized. Picking up these little atom things give an annoying punch and chime sound. All in all though, you don’t hear much of anything at any given time. The music goes from audible, to mute, then loops back its Addams Family bit. Sounds around you only come from item collections, stomping enemies, getting hit and landing from a jump. All simple Sally stuff. I read that there’s actual voice in the game, but either my copy is defective (hard to be when the game its self is already defective) or I can’t make out the voices through the aboundance of silence and Addams Family theme remixed.

I remembered two very distinct flaws to Bubsy 3D – visuals and controls. Visually, it looks worse than I remember, and I remember it looking like a wall painted orange and drying slowly. Control wise though….I really don’t know where to begin with this. Broken isn’t the right word, and neither is craptacular. Basically, Bubsy 3D’s controls just plain suck. You’ll be hard pressed to find anything that controls worse than this does. First, there’s no camera control. Physically turning yourself around moves the camera with you. Physically turning around is also very sluggish. Jumping is very floaty, almost reminiscent of Princess Toadstool in Super Mario Bros. 2 but less exaggeration. This can really mess with your platform jumping.

Hey look! They made "grass" on the ground, but not one cloud in the sky.

But what messes you up more with platform jumping, hell, what messes you up while playing the game at all, is actually moving Bubsy around. This was one of the reasons I could barely play more than 2 minutes at a time, and a chore to even do this RRR. Tap down and you baby hop back. Hold down for over a second and you begin to walk backwards. Running straight ahead is simple enough, but trying to turn while running is like physically pushing Deep Space Nine to the left while it’s going forward. There is no way to have forward progress and turn at all. This breaks the game more than it already is, because there’s some platforming elements to Bubsy 3D, and you have to turn what should be faster paced traveling on narrow platforms, into long, painful slow steps, slow turns while stationary. It’s weird, cause I remember Bubsy on the Sega Genesis being much faster paced, and now with Bubsy 3D, a parked car can move faster through this game than Bubsy himself.

When you jump, the camera pans into an almost overhead view to show where you’re landing. Maybe it was to help ease the fact that you have no camera control, and you can see where you can land, but the jumps are so floaty and controls are too crappy, that its counter intuitive. Mix in the fact that you can’t see some platforms below and ahead of you because of the lack of camera controls. The result is the most literal “leap of faith” ever seen. It’s almost 50/50 that you’d miss the platform below, but lets be honest, it’s not 50/50. There’s a 50% chance you’ll miss, 1% chance you’ll make it, and 49% chance you’re a moron for even trying more than twice.

Worst 3D platformer controls ever + narrow platforms + enemy at the end of platform = controller lodged into the wall.

It’s a life or death struggle to find something positive to say about Bubsy 3D. I can think of three good things to say about this game, though even these three are a bit of a stretch to call “positive”:

1. The game turns off.
2. It’s got a black bottom like other PSX games, and those look neat.
3. The overwhelming comedy from the image below :

GET IT?! It's PAUSED....and it says "PAWS" instead! Cause he's got PAWS! Ahh....shoot me.

Easily one of the top three worst games I have ever had to play. Why I even thought that time would change my views for the better on Bubsy 3D, I dunno. But this is bar none the second worst PSX game I have ever played (I had the unfortunate chance to play Cosmic Race) and not only is it bad for it’s time, not only was it bad when I first played it years ago, but it’s even worse now! If you love horror movies, Bubsy 3D is an interactive gorefest, one that will make you try to decapitate yourself with the game disc.

Rating Now: 0.5

Needless to say, without going much further into WHO this character was, he was never heard from again after his first foray into the 3D realm. But why? Was that a sendoff? Did the company move onto something bigger and better? Did it suck so bad that they tried to ignore the fact that this character, and its games, ever existed? Just who is this groovy cat, and what game is this character in? Can you make out the horribly done distortion up top? Tune in this Friday for a can’t-miss Retro Re-Review to see who this character is, what the game was and more importantly, many questions asking “WHY?!”

Stay up to speed on my Retro Re-Reviews, Quickie Reviews and other CL Gamer postings by clicking the “Galarian” tag on the Tag Cloud, located off to the right side!