Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game - Sega Genesis

I'm not really sure what to say about a wrestling game that takes you about 45 minutes to beat so I'll give you a little look into my formative years when I thought wrestling was better then The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and G.I. Joe combined.

Wrestling even today still holds some pretty fond memories for me. I still remember going to my cousins house and renting the Wrestle Mania from that year (probably about 1990) and watching it and loving every minute of it. I remember the action figures, I remember watching it on TV, I still have The Ultimate Warriors autograph somewhere, I remember being absolutely obsessed with the WWF. From the about the time I was eight to maybe the time I was eleven or so I loved wrestling. Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior, Randy Macho Man Savage, Jake The Snake Roberts, Earthquake, Andre the Giant, etc. For me that was the heyday of wrestling. Since then Hulk Hogan has essentially become a parody of himself, The Ultimate Warrior is a crazy right wing religious guy who seems about one step away from joining a militia, Randy Savage has... I don't know, faded into obscurity? Jake The Snake may now be homeless and smoking crack considering the shape he was in during Beyond the Mat, Earthquake has been dead now for a couple years as has Andre the Giant has been dead even longer. My point being is that this is the last time I actually kept up in any sort of fashion with wrestling. To me it was one of those things that I loved as a kid but have absolutely no interest in watching now or even by the time I was thirteen. So how do I rate a game based on that?

Wrestle Mania The Arcade Game was released in 1995, this is about two to three years after I had stopped watching wrestling. I actually recognize some of the wrestlers featured in the game though. The Undertaker, Bret Hit Man Hart, Shawn Michaels, Lex Lugar and Bam Bam Bigalow are all names I recognize. Though except for The Undertaker and Bret Hart I don't think I know any of them past there names, I never really watched them wrestle. So I decided to play the game as The Undertaker. I actually quite liked him when I was young.

You never appear to wrestle one on one in this game. It's alway one on two, one on three, and so on. You're always the one. You would think this would make for a rather difficult game, but really it doesn't. For the most part if you're attacking one of your opponents the other guy isn't really attacking you. Sure they sometimes will hit you in the back of the head, but for the most part they seem to wait their turn. Not sure if this is intentional or not, but it is what it is.

Most of the game can be beaten by using the kick button, the first couple of matches I had I just got a guy in a corner and kicked him into submission, found the second guy and did the same. You could probably beat the entire game this way, but what fun would that be? So I decided to break out the combo moves... and that's when I ran into the problems.

Apparently at some point Sega released a six button controller, this game talks about using it. The problem is that I have the three button controller. So to run? You have to hit A and C... considering there's a B in between those buttons that gets a little awkward. You're having to do two button combos and after a while it just gets annoying I would go back to kicking my opponents. I'm sure with a six button controller it would be a lot easier, but I don't have one.

The graphics are decent for a wrestling game, the sound is sometimes good and sometimes makes me want to shove a pencil into my ears. Overall the game is just kind of average. I'm sure it was fun in the arcade, but I'm not really sure it transfered over to the home game.

With a six button controller and perhaps a second player this game would be decent, but not anything to write home about. Without those two things it's 45 minutes of mashing the C button and kicking Bam Bam Biglow in the balls over an over.

Squid.

Jurassic Park - Sega Genesis

I've played a lot of games in my lifetime. Across every genre, every console, and every generation. I've played games that I consider excellent and I've played games that I consider absolutely awful. I'm not going to say that Jurassic Park for Sega Genesis is the worst game that I've ever played, but I will say it's damn near the top of the list. I will say it's probably the worst game I've played in the last year.

Before I play a game I kind of research it on the internet. Find out what kind of game it is, look at what kind of scores it received, find out what kind of cheat codes there are for it, basically just kind of look into the game.

I was actually kind of excited to play Jurassic Park, on GameFaqs the reviews were actually very good. There's only one review that's negative. Most of them are between eight and tens. I've come to the conclusion that this is either trolling at its finest, or these people are absolutely crazy and or stupid.

Where to start... there's so many bad things about this game. Maybe we should start off with the fact that this game controls like everything is submerged in Jell-O. Though I can't tell if it's because the controls are bad or because every time you try to move more then three feet the game suffers from horrible slow down. Maybe it's a mixture of both, you never really know. All I know is trying to make Dr. Grant land on a very tiny ledge while trying to combat bad controls and slow down? Makes the game perhaps one of the most frustrating things I've ever played.

I also ran into the problem on numerous occasions where for no real apparent reason dinosaurs became invincible. No matter how many darts I shot at the dinosaurs nothing would happen. This was almost always a problem with velociraptors. On the subject of velociraptors it wasn't uncommon for them to knock you down and then proceed to trap you in a corner knocking you down over and over until they killed you. So on top of everything else, the game also had some bugs!

The level design was awful, absolutely horrible, and broken. On several levels there were places where you could fall through the solid ground you were walking on and die. There were occasions where a small fall would lead to you having to jump at the exact right moment, or perhaps land on a small ledge and if you missed it you died. Littered throughout the game were little problems with the level that could easily kill you for no real rhyme or reason. Sometimes over and over again. On the first level there was a spot where you have to crawl out on to a branch, three out of four times I'd live, the other one time? Fall to my death. Nothing changed, I didn't go out farther on the limb I wasn't running, nothing was different. Hell, I even was landing in the same spot... sometimes you just died.

Here's the interesting thing. There's quite a few things about this game that aren't too bad. The music is decent, the graphics are fairly good, the ability to play as Dr. Grant or a velociraptor is cool... I can see it being a somewhat decent game. Here's the problem though: all those problems I listed above? Those are all so irritating, so awful that they make the game almost unplayable. It took me 45 minutes to beat the first Dr. Grant level. I watched a YouTube video on how to beat it and still couldn't. I played it over and over again and just couldn't beat it. It's not that I'm bad at games, it's not that Jurassic Park is hard, it's just that it's broken.

That's the best way to describe Jurassic Park: broken. Not bad, broken. When you're trying to play a game that is broken it starts to become frustrating. It starts wearing on you. You want to beat a level but you just can't because it's broken.

The absolutely best thing I can think to say about Jurassic Park is that it's short. You can beat both campaigns in about two to three hours. In all honesty if the game wasn't broken I would guess that you could beat it in about a half hour or so. That shows you just how broken it is. For the love of God skip this game. It's absolutely awful.

Squid.

Clockwork Knight - Sega Saturn

Clockwork Knight is one of those games that I've owned for well over a decade and have probably never played, or if I have played it it's for maybe a couple of minutes. Want to know how I know this? Because you can beat this game in about an hour. Maybe a little bit longer if you play it on a harder level.

I'm going to get this out of the way: I'm not a huge fan of platformers. Sure, there are quite a few that I really like but for the most part I don't really enjoy them. For every Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog there's about 100 platformers that don't control well, are difficult because they're way too short or just because of gameplay problems, or have a level that involves ice and moving platforms... you get the idea. I guess the thing is, when platformers are done well I don't mind them, but for the most part? They're just not done very well. They seem like the kind of games that are made to be made. Want a movie tie in? Platformer. Want to make some kind of shovelware game? Platformer. Want to make a kids game? Platformer. I don't think it's the genres fault that it has a lot of bad games to its name. It really just seems like developers tend to use the genre to occasionally make a quick buck.

So what category does Clockwork Knight fall into? Kind of in the middle. It's controls were okay, but not great. They felt kind of stiff. You would look at a jump you needed to make and wonder if you could because Pepper the Knight just doesn't control really how you want him to. Clockwork Knight was okay, but completely forgettable. About the only thing it had going for it was it's somewhat unique atmosphere as well as some pretty good cutscenes with some decent original songs.

One thing Clockwork Knight had against it was that it was incredibly short. I started playing it late the other night figuring I would get a couple levels in before bed. The first problem with this plan was that there are no save games, passwords, anything to save your progress. Annoying, but it didn't really matter because there was a cheat that would allow you to warp to any level. The next day I boot up Clockwork Knight, input the code, and that's when I realize that the level I stopped playing at the night before was in fact the last level of the game. If I had continued on for about fifteen minutes I would have beat the game. I would say that you could easily beat the game in under an hour if you were even somewhat decent at it.

Here's the problem, I don't know if I should dock points for that. I really enjoy Contra but I can easily beat that in under a half hour. The original Super Mario Brothers is a pretty short game... on the other hand Super Mario World is actually a pretty long game, so are a bunch of other platformers. There doesn't seem to be a set length when it comes to the platformer genre. If I bought an RPG and could beat it in an hour I'd think it's too short, hell even five hours might irk me... but platformers seem to be able to get away with it. Either way, here's letting you know that if you do play Clockwork Knight, don't expect a lot of time or replayability out of it.

Clockwork Knight just comes off as a mediocre kind of game. Nothing really stands out about it, and the few things that aren't too bad are kind of deflated by it's length and control issues. Maybe I did play this game when I first got it, maybe Clockwork Knight is just that forgettable. It's not a horrible game by any means, but it's also not what I would consider good. Clockwork Knight sits in the middle, somewhere between good and bad... and sadly, that's the best thing I can think to say about the game.

Squid.

The Ren & Stimpy Show Presents: Stimpy's Invention - Review

I love Ren & Stimpy. I used to watch the show all the time growing up. I still have a Stimpy doll that farts and tongue comes out when you squeeze its stomach... and yet I remember almost nothing about the show. I remember a few of the characters and the general feel of the show, but I couldn't tell you the plot of even one episode. So when it came time to give this game a whirl I was kind of excited to play it, perhaps it would bring back some of those long lost memories.

First off, let me say this: This game is incredibly short. Not Contra short, but getting there. It took me about an hour to beat the entire game. Not that it wasn't a fun hour, but I kind of expected my game to last longer then three episodes of the TV show it's based off of.

Overall Ren & Stimpy: Stimpy's Invention was enjoyable. It captured the wackiness and fun of the TV show. I enjoyed how you controlled one of the characters with the other being AI controlled. Sure the character you weren't controlling usually fell off of things and overall was kind of dumb but Powdered Toast Man always brought them back fairly quickly, plus you constantly used the other character for "special moves". Need to get up somewhere high? Ren would squeeze Stimpy and you'd shoot up like a rocket. Need to hit a far away target? Stimpy can pick up and throw Ren like a boomerang. There's tons of special moves that you'll use throughout the game. Most of them being very quirky and fun.

Now on to the bad. One of the special moves I had a very hard time with. It was when you pressed UP + C which is supposed to make you do a special move to get to higher points. I had a difficult time getting it to work, I would say it only worked about a third of the time. The only problem being, it could possibly have been my controller. I only have one Genesis controller and who knows how well it works. But let's just say that it's not my controller, even if this is the case while it was annoying, it certainly wasn't game breakingly annoying.

Also I would have liked to have seen different special moves for the characters. While they technically have different moves, those moves do the exact same thing. So pressing UP + C as Ren would make you squeeze air out of Stimpy and shoot you up like a rocket, with Stimpy it would make you turn Ren into a helicopter.. both of these just you to higher places. I would have liked to have used separate characters for separate things, you can beat the entire game as just one character. I would have liked to have NEEDED to use both characters to beat the game.

Also, I would have liked the game to be a longer.

Sure there are cons to this game, but other than the the length of this game I would say they're rather insignificant. This was a fun game and really did well in preserving the entire feel of the TV show. If you're a fan of Ren & Stimpy and want a fun but short game, this is for you. I'm also guessing this game would be pretty fun playing two player mode. If you can pick this game up for $5 or $6 I would say to give it a go.

Squid.

The Ren & Stimpy Show Presents: Stimpy's Invention - Sega Genesis

The next game I play will be the game of my brother's choosing: The Ren & Stimpy Show Presents: Stimpy's Invention. This game also has the distinction of being the game with the longest title out of all of the video games I own.

I remember nothing about this game, I don't know if this is one of those games that I owned when I originally had my Genesis or if this is a game I bought in my teen years because I remember really liking the show. I honestly am not sure if I've ever even played this game. So this is a new experience all around. Hopefully it's a good experience.

Squid.