Arcade - Golden Axe

Arcade

Golden Axe

OK, I decided to do a review of this today, simply because I recently obtained the Platinuminary Trophy on the PS3 Megadrive Games Compilation, which obviously included their famous coin-op conversion, Golden Axe. I'm not going to review the Megadrive conversion, simply because the Arcade game was far superior. Not to say the home conversion was awful, but believe me, you would notice the difference.

Anyway. Golden Axe tells the story of three warriors, all of whom have lost family at the hands of the evil "Death Adder". I say 3 warriors, but obviously you can only take a maximum of 2 through the game... so one of them's going to have to do without the pleasure of revenge. Ah, well.

Your three warriors are a varied bunch, there's Ax Battler the Barbarian, whose sword has a reasonable reach, can move round the screen at a reasonable pace, and possesses reasonable magic skills. All in all, he's a pretty average, reasonable character to play with. Feminists can rejoice, however, as Tyris Flare, the Amazon, balances up the gender differences with her puny little sword, fast attacks and most powerful magic. Luckily there's something for the vertically-challenged too as Gilius Thunderhead, the Dwarf, boasts the longest weapon (oo-er), but the weakest magic.

The main gameplay is pretty similar to Double Dragon, to be fair, it's a side-scrolling beat/slash-em 'up with bells on. The game begins as one of your friends staggers across the screen, injured, only to be attacked from behind by a typical enemy grunt. As he dies, you take up the rather lop-sided battle to avenge him and your family members. Luckily, you've got health, magic and your own player skill on your side as the game's AI starts off pretty sloppy, but later on in the game you'll find yourself struggling to beat some of the game's tougher enemies.

You do have a wide range of attacks to use, though. Tapping the attack button will start a combination slash attack that can end in a variety of ways, either smacking the enemy's head a few times, giving them a swift kick, or even hoisting them up on your shoulder and throwing them to the side. Using the jump button will allow you to make mid-air slash attacks, and you can also double-tap a direction to charge across the screen and launch a shoulder barge or charging headbutt attack. Combining a dash with a jump can also unleash a downward-stabbing attack that can kill some weaker enemies with a single hit. Pressing the attack and jump buttons simultaneously will cause you to attack behind you, either with a sword-twirl or a roll and a swing of the axe in the case of Gilius Thunderhead.

The most impressive part of the game had to be the magic attacks, however. Ax Battler summons the power of the Earth in the form of Volcanos, Gilius Thunderhead commands the power of Lightning (Who saw that one coming??), and Tyris Flare, without wanting to be too obvious, pulls forth the infernal fires of Hell. Or something like that.

In fact, the main reason for choosing Tyris at the character select screen was to see her magic in action, as hers was both the most powerful and the most impressive. Whilst Ax's huge volcanic eruption was good (when magic was full), Tyris could summon lots of small fires, a couple of swooping fire elementals, or even bring down a huge fire-breathing dragon with maximum magic power. Yes, I would save my magic potions up just to see that.

Enemies, then... they range from the usual enemy grunts and skeletons, to huge giants and armoured foes and of course the token female enemies who are generally considerably weaker but faster, as seems to be usual in this genre.

Magic can be gained (and stolen) when you encounter the little blue elves, and green elves carry food for health. Between levels you are often surprised by a couple of these while resting. You have only seconds to attempt to get as much inventory from them as you can.

The levels themselves are ingenious, ranging from the "Turtle Village" (yes, a village on the back of a giant turtle) to the fight on the back of an eagle. Honestly.

Other than that... there's really only the Bizarrians left to mention. Y'see, a staple of beat 'em-ups was that you could pick up weapons to use against the enemy. It's one of those rules, I guess, that there has to be weapons of some kind. But in this game, you already have a weapon, and it appears to be glued to your hands and unreleasable (except that you are apparently ambidextrous and swap hands according to which direction you're facing... d'oh). The addition of magic wasn't enough, so instead they added dragon-like creatures you can ride on. They come in 3 flavours, there's the "Chicken Leg" one which knocks enemies down with a sweep of its tail, the blue one which gives a short range blast of fire onto the ground, and the best of the lot is the red one, which will breathe a fireball that will travel the full length of the screen. Unfortunately it's also the rarest of the lot, but it makes one of the boss battles in particular a very easy one.

The game was, as I said, converted with great success (and alterations) to the Megadrive with the loss of graphical detail, but unfortunately a series of comparitively CRAP sequels followed.

With good reason, Golden Axe was very popular in arcades. It's a smooth, fluid, brutal game with a fair degree of fun and with excellent graphics for the time. Don't waste your time with the console sequels, I only played them to get the aforementioned Platinuminary trophy... and I didn't enjoy it. Grr.

Old TV Shows - The Crystal Maze

TV Show

The Crystal Maze

Defining moments in television... the Moon Landings, perhaps? Royal Weddings? The first episode of Going Live!? Nah, much better than all those is the day Challenge TV came to Freeview.

Alright, maybe I'm not completely serious on that, but it certainly was a great moment for retro-heads like me. The ability to watch old episodes of Wheel of Fortune, Catchphrase along with newer shows like Pointless, or Takeshi's Castle (I'm not such a fan of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire) is marvellous, and the channel is worth the licence fee alone.

But the absolute crowning glory for the channel is the re-runs of The Crystal Maze (Well, it is now they're not showing Knightmare anymore).

What's that? You've never HEARD of the Crystal Maze??? Then you NEED to watch it, try tuning into Challenge (46 on Freeview, some other number on Sky, possibly still 121) at 6pm on a weekday, or around dinnertime at Weekends... you'll most likely catch it then. But for your benefit, I'll try and explain.

The Crystal Maze was an hour-long gameshow in which a team of six would attempt to "Crack" the Crystal Dome. The Maze itself was divided into four themed zones, originally it was the Futuristic, Aztec, Medieval and Industrial zones, but the Industrial Zone was later replaced by the Ocean Zone. In each of these zones the team would have the chance to play usually 4 or 5 games, each timed from 2-3 minutes. Successful completion of the game would result in the acquisition of a crystal.

At the end of the 4 zones, each crystal would be worth 5 seconds of time in the Crystal Dome itself, where the team would attempt to collect as many Gold tokens as they could, and, after deducting any Silver tokens from their total, a score over 100 would win the big prize. Or Prizes. Slight problem, the Crystal Dome is essentially a big wind tunnel with the tokens flying everywhere. Sounds like fun to me.

So that's the Crystal Maze in a nutshell... but keep digging and you find there's actually more to it than that.

First off, the games themselves ranged from very easy to excrutiatingly difficult, and failure to leave the game room within the time limit would result in a team member being locked in with no escape... unless the rest of the team was willing to sacrifice a crystal to buy them out again.

Some games featured an automatic lock-in too, usually a 3-strike thing (don't drop something or set an alarm off perhaps) or an instant lock in for something like touching the floor.

Games came in four flavours, too; Mystery, Physical, Mental and Skill. The team captain would call the odds, stating what type would be played next, and which team member was going to try it. Some of my personal favourite games were the "Medieval Battering Ram" and the "Futuristic Circuit Puzzle", whilst I was always filled with dread at the thought of the Future Zone's very difficult "Carry the Crystal Safe" Physical game, which was basically a test of steady hands. Not many contestants made it out of that room, and I think I can only remember it being completed once.

And as yet, I haven't mentioned all the finer points such as Richard O'Brien's presenting skills and the backstories he came up with for aspects of each zone, his impromptu harmonica performances, his "mumsey" living in the Medieval Zone, and how much poorer it all seemed when Ed Tudor-Pole took over.

Of course, the show's popularity was immense, and soon there were board games, interactive Crystal Maze games (I so wish I'd gone in the one in the SandCastle at Blackpool), SWPs and even Fruit Machines.

There's a good reason it's being repeated countless times on Challenge... it's nothing short of pure awesome, and if you haven't seen it yet, sort it out and watch it.

Commodore Amiga - Worms

Commodore Amiga

Worms

Y'know, from time to time, somebody somewhere will come up with a genius new idea. And then, there'll be someone who comes up with someone else's idea, dusts it off and brings it up to date. But people forget about the original, or pretend it never existed.

Take J K Rowling, for instance. Harry Potter is far from an original idea, and borrows so many things from other people's stories (especially Enid Blyton), yet no-one (but me) seems to be able to draw the connection. Especially with the whole "Wizard Chess" thing, which was so blatantly stolen from "Battle Chess" it was unbelievable.

But no matter, it made her lots of money, and I'm sure she's very happy with herself for that. I wish I could do the same thing without any comeback.

Back in the late 90s, though, the fuss was all about one individual bedroom coder, who polished up an old concept of wind, angles and power, the age old game of Artillery Wars.

What's that? You don't remember that? It's kind of like City Bomber... every BASIC programmer worth his salt in the early 80s had a crack at recreating certain concepts, City Bomber was one, Artillery Wars was another. Over the years there's been many well known variations, take the QBasic game "Gorilla", which, once I'd discovered it on the school network, everyone was playing (at least until I discovered the Snake game for PASCAL). Or then there was the shareware game Scorched Tanks, which I think Amiga Format gave away once. What a cracking game that was.

But then along comes Andy Davidson with Total Wormage, "his" concept is snapped up by Team 17, and before you know it, you have a highly successful game on your hands.

So let's say you haven't heard of Artillery Wars, QBASIC Gorilla, or even Scorched Tanks... you probably heard of Worms. Just in cases, let's give you a quick run-down of the basic mechanics of the game.

Traditionally, this genre saw you sat in a gunning station, and you had to choose the angle and power of your shot. You may have hills or a crevasse to shoot over, but normally you couldn't actually move, which left it down to who got the most accurate angle and power quickest. Your shot would tend to travel in a perfect arc, so a good tactic was to start with an angle of something like 85 degrees and full power.

Move on a few years, and to a shareware game called Scorched Tanks. This variation added the ability to move (somewhat limited), and a very wide variety of weapons and shields. Ooooh, yes, this one was a real evolution of the concept, with weapons such as the Mega-Nuke, the Cruise Missile, the Dirt Inverter (or something like that) and the Bouncing Bomb.

Alright, my memory's a little hazy, I may have got some of those wrong. The important bit is it was a MASSIVE advance from the games of old, with some highly enjoyable weapons to play with.

Onto Worms, then. Basically, replace the tanks with Worms, add wind effects and shuffle the weapons about a bit... and there you have it. An all-original concept! Just like Harry Potter and Wizard Chess.

OK, so I'm being facetious, and the thing is I'd have every right to be... if it wasn't for the fact that Worms was so DAMN GOOD. I don't know, there's just something of the X-Factor in there, that certain je ne sais quoi.

Was it the cartoony violence? Or was it the cartoony chipmunk-like voices? Perhaps it was just the straight-up playability. Or shall we say all these things worked together in Synergy, resulting in something better than the sum of its parts. Whilst you could attempt to deplete all your opposition's energy by Airstrikes, or Dragon Punches, you were far better served getting an explosion to knock several opposition worms into the water. Being knocked off the landscape spelt certain (and instant) death, and the slippy, slidey composition of the common worm ensured that being perched atop a hill was not necessarily the best choice of strategic positioning.

Weapons wise, they range from the fairly standard range of Bazookas, Homing Missiles, Grenades & Cluster Bombs, to close range weapons like the Uzi, Shotgun & Dragon Punch, to devastating weapons like Dynamite, the Air Strike, Banana Bombs & the amazing Sheep. There's also more defensive tools such as Girders and the Ninja Rope, and finally the embarassing Prod. Although a selectable weapon in most versions of Worms, in the Amiga version it was hidden and could only be activated by a certain key combination (in true Mortal Kombat style, the combination was to press away from your intended victim twice, then towards them twice).

Take too long and the game enters Sudden Death... all living worm's health drops to 1 point, and the water level begins to rise. The slightest touch of a weapon will kill, and digging your way underground will just minimise your chances of survival.

Another interesting aspect to this game was the terraforming... you could either generate a landscape randomly or enter a code or word to recreate a previous landscape. Or, your random word might provide you with an interesting layout just anyway. Try the code "NAPALM", one I discovered very early on... a great tactical map!

Whilst the original Worms game might be hard to (legally) come by these days, you would only be substituting aesthetic differences by settling for Worms 2 (which was also very popular). But it's worth tracking down given the oppurtunity!

Arcade - Paperboy

Arcade

Paperboy

Alright, now we're talking. This is Retro Gaming people REMEMBER. No, really.

If you like Retro Gaming, just the mere mention of Paperboy has probably already got you humming the music in your head... I know I have. Aaargh, will have to go and play it. Now.

OK, had a quick game. Guess what? It's half the fun without the handlebars.

Alright, seriously now, this is one of those occasions where I think we have to stand in awe of Atari. Y'see, there's been many games brought out with kind of unique ideas, but they've never stayed that way. Here, with the exception of the hopeless home computer rip-off "Paperboy 2", I can't think of another game like this.

Here's the premise, on the surface it's very simple: Deliver newspapers to your customers, avoiding obstacles on the way. Now, you could take that as the be-all-and-end-all of it, but it's far from that simple.

First off, your customers. They all own nice bright houses, with big letter boxes. Deliver a paper to their door or their letter box to keep their custom. As Paperboys go, you're as lazy as they come, flinging the paper, America-style, whilst riding your bike down the street. Yup, none of this lark of riding your bike on one pedal and jumping off or even entirely by foot in the depths of winter, putting the paper through nicely like us harder, stiff-upper-lipped British Boys do, just simply pedal and pelt the papers, pulverising pugilists and pleasing your patrons, perambulating the pathway as you go.

 OK, now I've got that awful bit of alliteration out of the way (sorry, couldn't resist), I can get back to explaining the game. As well as customers, you have... that's right, non-customers. Did you see that one coming? They all own dark houses, many with gravestones in their front garden, and you can either simply not deliver a paper to them, or you can smash their furniture and/or windows and accumulate a "damage" bonus. Nice, huh?

If you manage to miss any customers along your way or damage their property, they will cancel their subscription. Lose ALL your customers and you'll get your P45 and Marching Orders, in other words "Game Over". Oh, and you have a limited supply of newspapers to throw, so don't get too happy with the fire button, although there are more you can collect.

In MAME, the game is best controlled with the mouse (although it's tricky), but in the arcades the cabinet had a set of handlebars mounted on the front, which were truly awesome. But the best bit of the game comes at the end of each day's round... the stunt course. Suddenly you are armed with an infinite supply of papers, which you can throw at the targets for big bonus points, whilst negotiating winding paths, narrow bridges and jumps. It's a bit of a change of pace, but incredibly good fun.

Once again, it's the "nice touches" that make this game so awesome. Some of the obstacles and bonuses you can score are normal everyday things, from the people driving cars down the street to the young lad with the remote control car, to cats and dogs, drunk pedestrians, unicycle-riding punks (erm?) and the naughty cat-burglar trying to break in a side-window. Most of these can be dealt with by means of high-speed Newspaper, but some have to simply be avoided. It's worth getting them with a newspaper though, for example there's often two men having a fist fight... hurl a newspaper at them to knock one out and the other raises his arms in victory. Nice.

One thing is for sure, if you spend 5 minutes on this game, you WILL be humming the music for the rest of the day. Gah, I'm STILL humming it now. Everyone around me wonders what the hell it is I'm singing.

Paperboy. It'll ruin your life. But you have to play it.

PC - Max Payne

PC 

Max Payne

Dark trenchcoats. Slow Motion "Bullet Time". Diving around shooting guns. What's that, you say? Sounds like The Matrix?

Hmm. I wonder if there was any inspiration there. To be honest, it's blindingly obvious, but fortunately what DIDN'T happen is that the resulting gaming experience was NOT in any way rushed out so much as to be an awful game. Almost unbelievably, I've got nothing but praise for what was basically a cash-in on a popular film licence.

No, I have to hand it to Remedy, they made a great game, with a great storyline, and here's the bit no-one will ever agree with me on... great voice-acting.

Alright, I know, everyone who looks at this game slates the voice acting, I just don't understand why. It might not be up there with the likes of the Uncharted series (Nolan North does have an incredible talent), but it's so far above, say, House of the Dead 2 on the Dreamcast it's not even funny. This is the thing, I suppose, it comes down to personal taste, and Max's dead-pan delivery is spot-on to me.

Anyway, enough of that, let's talk about the game now. To cut a long story short, Max Payne is an undercover policeman whose family are murdered by drugged-up thugs. As a man with nothing to lose, he's prepared to stop at nothing to uncover the secrets and lies behind the origin of the drug in question, known as V. Starting out among some of the less desirable of the criminal underworld, you slowly fight your way up the chain, discovering eventually that the whole dang thing is overseen by... well, I won't spoil that for you.

The gameplay itself takes a little while to get used to, but once you do, you'll be spinning and shooting your way in slow motion all over the place. Whilst as a 3rd-person shooter you can just run around and shoot your enemies, they're pretty accurate and have fast reactions, you're likely to die fairly quickly. You need to find cover and get the hang of diving out in Bullet-Time, aiming with the mouse, trying to get the crucial head-shot or enough body hits to drop the enemies. You may have 2 or 3 to aim at, so your reactions need to be quick. Accuracy will increase the amount of Bullet-Time you can use, and you can use your Bullet-Time whilst just walking around, but it runs out very quickly in that instance, so there's really not much point.

Weapons wise there's a good selection, several of which can be dual wielded, but my personal favourite is the Sniper Rifle. Aim at an enemy's head, and you're treated to a camera angle following the spinning bullet as it traces a path to the fatal impact. It's a gimmick, yes, but it works.

To be honest, this was probably one of the first "cinematic" games I really enjoyed. Cut-scenes and storyboards are part and parcel of games nowadays, and Max Payne used them EFFECTIVELY. Alright, graphics are much more sophisticated now, but we'd advanced from Quake and the idea of using the Quake engine to make movies, which, let's be honest... wasn't all that great.

Alright, so the game can get a little repetitive at times, but it was nothing short of superb. To keep you playing, there were several difficulty levels, which included a special difficuly called "New York Minute", in which you had a 1 minute timer to complete each level. Don't worry, you could earn extra time, but you were always up against it with that timer.

It's worth it, though, because, as a little bonus, hidden away at the end of the game is a version of the lobby gunfight from The Matrix... yeah, it's not exactly the same, but then again, with free level-design tools available on the internet, plenty of people made more accurate versions of that particular scene.

So there's a new Max Payne game coming out. Will I buy it? Maybe. Will it be as good as the original? Doubt it, but I hope so.

One thing's for sure, it's got a lot to live up to. If you haven't played the original, go and find it. Now.

Arcade - Q*Bert

Arcade
Q*Bert

Sometimes, the simple ideas work best. If a game can be summed up in a fairly succinct sentence, it's a simple game, and in the 80s that was a recipe for success. For example: Run round a maze, eat all the dots, avoid the ememies, repeat ad infinitum. Shoot alien spacecraft before they shoot you. Make horizontal lines out of blocks to prevent them reaching the top of the screen. Or how about turn all the blocks the right colour by bouncing on them, avoiding the enemies?

Well, if that wasn't a giveaway, I don't know what is, because that is basically all you do in Q*Bert. Simples!

Simple doesn't mean easy, though. In fact, it's devilishly hard. First off, the games in a 3D perspective, and the game's physics plays real tricks on you as you progress.

Let's start from the beginning then... You start atop a pyramid made of cubes, and must commence jumping on all the cubes to change them to the correct colour. However, other creatures will soon start to show up, like bouncy balls that will go from top to bottom, trying to intercept you on the way. You'll notice first of all, however, that the purple ball will stop at the bottom, and turn into a relentlessly chasing snake, able to travel in exactly the same way as you... but slower.

There's a way to deal with it, but it's only temporary. The little discs at the side of the maze (you may have noticed them) are acutally lifts that take you back to the top of the pyramid. If you jump on one of these with the snake in pursuit, he will jump off after you, to his death... only to be replaced by another one seconds later. Still, there's bonus points in it for you.

From level 2, it starts to get harder very quickly indeed. Blocks will need 2 or 3 bounces to cycle through colours until you get the right one up, and enemies will start coming from all sides, almost as if gravity to them is sideways rather than downwards. The 3D view does you no favours here as they skip along the sides of cubes, and you try to work out what bloody way they're going, and which way you should go to avoid them.

But that's the game, that's where the real challenge lies, and that's where you'll keep coming back for more, no matter how frustrating you find it; A sign of a great game indeed! Somehow you never tire of seeing the nonsense-swear-word-speech-bubble pop up again and again and again...

Your chances of finding an original working cabinet (complete with solenoid to cause a "bump" inside the cabinet when you or an enemy plummet to your death) are slim, but worth a little effort to find. If you get nowhere, though, there's always MAME.

Finally, is it just me who thinks our hero in this game looks like a bodyless Cyril Sneer from The Raccoons?

Arcade - Rampage

Arcade
Rampage

Ah, the old monster movies... Godzilla, King Kong... erm... quick, think of one involving a big wolf. Alright, I can't, but there probably is one. How great would it be if all three monsters got together in one movie?

Well, the wheels have been in motion since the mid-80s, when Bally Midway released the arcade game Rampage. 3 players can play at once, each assuming the role of one of the aforementioned monsters, or rather a non-copyright-infringing equivalent. The storyline is that you are actually a mutated human, the mutation being caused by some super vitamin or a radioactive lake or something.

And your aim? Well, pretty much cause as much destruction and devastation to the single screen play area as you can. Destroy all the buildings, and move onto the next screen. Sounds pretty simple, right? Well it would be, but unfortunately there's a lot of people none too happy about that. In particular, the armed forces are out to get you, with soldiers, helicopters and tanks all coming to try and take little bits off your health.

Luckily, your energy bar is pretty enormous, and it'll take a fair few hits before you finally succumb, at which point you revert to your naked human form, hastily sidestepping away whilst covering your vanity. Nice touch!

So, how do you bring the buildings down? Pretty simple, climb them and punch the living hell out of them. Using the joystick, you can aim your punch in different directions, so you can, for instance, punch directly upwards to take out a helicopter, or even behind you. But whilst you're on the side of a building you need to be punching either the outside walls or the windows. Once a building takes enough damage, it will start to crack, and then collapse. Unfortunately, you're probably still attached to the building, so you'd better jump off before you come down with it and receive a fair bit of damage.

Luckily, there are ways to give your health a boost, people and objects appear in windows, and you can eat some of these; beware, however, that some items will actually cause you damage. A good example of this is the toaster. Try to grab it and it electrocutes you... unless the toast has popped up, in which case you will eat the toast. Clever, huh?

The problem is... that's all there is to it. That's it. There's no official end to the game, you get a bonus every 128 levels, and after level 768 you go back to level 1... but this isn't a game to play score attack on. It's a game for a sharp burst of fun, a good laugh, even better with 2 friends. The high-res graphics remind me of Atari's games, but with typical Bally Midway cartooniness.

But now we come full circle... the game ripping off 3 major film franchises / monsters, is set to be made into a movie itself! It's almost unbelievable.

Whether it'll be any good or not, of course, is an entirely different story.