Level Up: Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine

This intro is going to be a little different. See, the reason I’m reviewing today’s game is because roughly 3 years ago, my dad passed away. Now, I think it goes without saying, many of us wouldn’t be gamers if not for our parents, and that’s the case with me, my dad is the one who got me my SNES with Donkey Kong Country (and like I said in that review, it’s what started my collection). Of course, he would also play some games with me when he saw I had something that interested him: he wasn’t a gamer by any means, but he would be up for Diddy Kong Racing or Wii Sports. But today’s game is the one I remember playing with him the most, and we would have tournaments that would last for hours or continue for weeks. He was always into Tetris and Dr. Mario style puzzle games, so this game was really right up his alley. Today’s review is Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine originally for the Sega Genesis.

Before talking about Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, I first have to talk about another series: Puyo Puyo. Kind of like Pokemon Puzzle League in relation to Panel De Pon, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine is a re-skin of an already existing puzzle series to help it break into North America. As a matter of fact, this isn’t the only version of this game to come out around that time, as the Super Nintendo would get Kirby’s Avalanche. Eventually, the series would be released on its own in North America under the name “Puyo Pop”. Oddly enough though, the development rights to Puyo Puyo now belongs to Sonic Team, since Compile, the game’s creators, went bankrupt. However, this is because they helped first release the game into arcades, and not because of this game, which ties the two series together.

Another thing that makes this game interestingly tied to other sources is the fact that this is the only game that directly references the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog TV cartoon. It has many of the familiar characters like Coconuts, Grounder or Scratch and he other adversary robots used in the game also have the feel of the show. There’s even a plot- yes, a plot for a Tetris style puzzle game- that resembles the show (which is to say, it’s just silly). Dr. Robotnik kidnapped the “jolly citizens of Beanville” and put them in his Mean Bean Streaming Machine to make them into his robot slaves. But the lamest part is there is no mention of Sonic what so ever. In Kirby’s Avalanche, we clearly saw that you were playing as Kirby, so we are pretty much left to assume that you are playing as yourself in this game. It saddens me that this is the closest thing to a “Dr. Eggman game” that we have so far.

The Puyo Puyo game play works a bit like Dr. Mario, in which that you are given 2 blocks of random colors at a time and matching 4 of the same color together will make the blocks disappear. However, there are a few key differences. First off, there isn’t anything to clear, this just a competition game, so whoever can keep matching blocks the longest and not pile them to the top wins. There are also more colors, but those differences are really small potatoes; here’s where the game really becomes unique. First off, the blocks (which are called “beans” in this game or “slimes” in regular Puyo Puyo) aren’t stuck together as two, so if there is nothing under a bean when you place a couple, it will fall down. Secondly, you don’t need to make a straight line; as long as a bean is touching another of its color either horizontally or vertically, it will connect to it, and once 4 connect in any way, they will vanish.  Of course, this connection isn’t strong enough to keep the bean from succumbing to gravity, so if whatever is below a bean disappears, the bean will still fall. The rest is pretty much the usual; you can rotate the pieces to place them however you want, try to create combos to send garbage to the other ride, links of beans that touch garbage will take away the garbage and if your beans reach the top of the screen, you lose. I really think that this might make it easier to learn than Dr. Mario, but might be harder to master in terms of making combos.

My position on Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine is a little complicated. I mean, obviously I love the game play, as it’s addictive, yet requires a fair bit of forward thinking to exploit it fully. However, there’s not a whole lot done with it in this game, just the competition and survival modes (I’m sure future Puyo Puyo games would do a lot more). I also don’t like how it labels itself as the only Robotnik/Eggman game there currently is and that it’s his crappy TV show counterpart that gets the spot light. However, I do understand that it got more people to play this game, and finding it on collections such as the Sonic Mega Collection (like I played it) or Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection and the ports on the Game Gear, Sega Master System or Virtual Console makes it so it still might be some people’s first exposure to the game. Not really a Sonic game, not the best version of the game, but still a lot of fun and it succeeded at what it wanted to do. I give Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine for the Sega Genesis 8.5 levels out of 10.

Level Up: Guitar Hero World Tour

Man, that was one hell of a new year’s eve party, only getting over it now. A couple of years ago I celebrated this occasion by talking to you about DJ Hero, a spin-off series from- Oh haha, spin off, that’s a joke-… Where was I? Oh right, Guitar Hero. That series really created a boom in music rhythm games; I’m sure they existed before, but now you could easily pretend to be your favorite rock star in your own home with a real fake guitar. For a while though, the name explained the big, obvious hole in the series: what if you fantasized about being the next Mick Jagger instead of Keith Richards? Well the fourth game fixed that by letting full band join in. Let’s see how that turned out with Guitar Hero: World Tour available for a bunch of consoles I don’t feel like listing off, including the Wii as I have it.

I now realize that I haven’t yet talked about the Guitar Hero series directly, only mentioning it in other rhythm game reviews. Like most of them, Guitar Hero will have you quote-unquote “playing” a song by hitting certain buttons at certain times to play “notes”. Continuously hitting correct notes will increase your score and make the Rock Meter go up, while missing them or hitting incorre6ct ones will make it go down and eventually fail the song. If you find yourself in danger of failing, you can activate Star Power (provided you’ve collected enough Star shaped notes earlier).

That’s the basic Guitar Hero format, so what’s new? I already mentioned the new instruments: they work basically in the same way, hit the right note at the right time to get a higher score. There are also some game play changes due to the fact that they wanted to concentrate more on allowing a bunch of people of multiple skills levels to join in. This includes shared Star Power (which I don’t like), a beginner mode, and the ability to change your difficulty at any point in the career mode (a great change).

Another new feature in this game is the song creator, where you can make your own music and send it out for other people to hear. Some of the ones I’ve downloaded are really good. Since I have the Wii version, there are a lot of great remakes of Nintendo songs (I don’t know if there are as many on other versions of this game). There are also a lot of covers of other famous songs, and a few original (which I doubt get as many downloads). However, this mode does have its limits, most noticeably that you can’t do anything with a microphone. I also find this mode to be a distraction at best (I seriously forgot about it until I wrote this review) and the controls for creating music a little user unfriendly. Not something I consider and attraction for the game personally, but some may have a lot of fun with it.

However, the final big addition is the custom character creator, and it’s the one that caused me the most problem, and I’ll try my best to explain why. See, for this version of Guitar Hero, the makers decided to give you the option of putting “yourself” in the game by creating an avatar. My problem is that in Guitar Hero 3, we got a story, and a very fun one at that, which they were able to make due to showing the rest of the band. However, since you can be the “rest of the band”, it’s also fully customable. So, they can’t be shown in any cut scenes (there are ones at the beginning and at the end of career, but it hardly counts as a “story”). You can play as the old characters too (and a few celebrities) but the game doesn’t seem to care for them and just makes the main focus your blank slate. And that’s where my main problem is: there is no “personality” to this game. There are a few other aspects to it, but basically it becomes “play the songs and move on”. It’s just so disappointing when the previous game (the one that got me into the whole music rhythm genre) did it so well.

Personally, I think Guitar Hero: World Tour was a misstep at a horrible time for the series. At the inevitable turning point, Activision published something that failed to really charm anyone. It also didn’t help that there were numerous issues with the instruments that came with it and a lot of compatibility problems with other instruments that made you rely on them. However, Guitar Hero: World Tour isn’t a  bad game, as it does build on the game play mechanics that came before it and provides more songs for people to rock out to (though personally, I’m not wowed by the selection). It also had all of the original recordings for the songs used, which they managed to do before Rock Band.  This isn’t a bad game, but by far failed to live up to what was required from it. I give Guitar Hero: World Tour for the Nintendo Wii 7 levels out of 10.

Level Up: Spider-man & Venom : Maximum Carnage

The holiday season is once again upon us. This year, I’ll be bundled up inside, by the warm glow of my television set waiting for a visit from one of my favorite persons wearing red: Carnage! Among my favorite villains ever, Carnage ranks pretty high (possibly even number one). His complete disregard for life, desire for chaos, lack of humanity and powers that can rival one of the greatest super heroes of all time makes him a force you surely don’t want to go up against. And when it comes to Carnage, one story always comes up that is said to demonstrate what he is all about: the 14 part series Maximum Carnage, where he pushes Spider-man to his limits as a hero. Or so I’ve heard, I haven’t read it myself, but I have played the video game Spider-man and Venom: Maximum Carnage, available for the Sega Genesis, but I’ll be talking about the version given to me as a gift, the one on the Super Nintendo.

Since it’s the first thing you’ll see in the game (and since I just played a clip from the song) it’s worth starting off by mentioning that the sound track was composed by the metal/rock band Green Jelly (and yes, it’s pronounced JELL-O; the umlaut makes the Y sound like an O. If Ke$ha’s dollar sign can be pronounced like an S, we can grasp this concept). This gives most of the music a pretty “hard core” feel, and for want of a better term, it sounds so “90’s”. Of course since the technology of the time wouldn’t allow for recorded music, we get computerized versions. The down sampling is obvious, but not enough to ruin it. As for the other sounds, they vary. Some of them boarder on stock, some of them are too goofy and some are 100% satisfying (I really do like the punching noises).

I also like the graphics too. They keep them comic book style, but not cartoon like and silly. I think I’ve said before it’s easy to make Spidey look too buff or too lanky, but here the balance is good (maybe a bit too many details around the pecks). The other licensed characters are done in this same “that IS what they should look like” manner. Obviously nothing is uniquely interpreted, which is good because this is based off the comic and should reflect what it contained. Speaking of which, this game has cut scenes directly redrawn from the comic panels and… I like don’t like them. They look authentic I suppose, but also flat and really pixelated. It’s nice that they tried though.

The game play is pretty much your standard brawler, with a few extra spidey skills thrown in. You’ll walk through areas and fight generic, pallet swapped bad guys with names like Bret or Billy. Who, with the hair, looks like Billy Bob Thornton? *Clip* How so? *clip* Okay, well sorry. Anyways, you can punch, block and jump like in any game, but you can also climb walls to attack from them or hide or use your web to swing into enemies, grab them from a far or tie them up.

Unfortunately, this game is only one player for some reason despite having two protagonists. I think it might have been to keep in line with the original story, but again, I haven’t read it yet. As fun as this game is, I could only imagine it would be a lot more fun if it was multiplayer. It would also be a lot easier because I found this game hard, almost up there with Double Dragon NES. There are secret recovery items, lives, assists and continues that you can find throughout the game to help you out though. Personally I had to find them all to be able to get a shot at finishing this, because this game makes you earn your fight with one of the best villains ever.

Spider-man and Venom: Maximum Carnage is a surprisingly good game. It’s fast paced, offers a challenge that will make you want to find all the secrets and its simple, classic, beat-em-up fun.  Being a direct adaptation of a story many people have enjoyed probably helps too. However, it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t a perfect game, and I’ve had people with legitimate complaints explain to me why they don’t like it: there is no two player mode, there isn’t enough variety among the super villains (though this was to keep it as close to the original story as possible), Spider-man being beaten up by random thugs is not something you want to see and the game can be too hard, with no save features, passwords or option to change the difficulty. However, I still say that none of these things ruin the game for me at all. This really is a title worth checking out, brought to us by developer Software Creations and published by…  LJN?! They made a game that’s not just ok, but really good? Who knew that was possible? Anyways, I give Spider-man and Venom: Maximum Carnage for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System 9 levels out of 10.

Level Up - Revolution X

Every now and then, it’s hard to say when a concept for a video game sounds awesome or just plain stupid. Now, you’d think that line would be drawn quite clearly drawn somewhere, but today’s game has the plot of “save Aerosmith and all of ‘Youth Culture’ from the hands of a corrupt government”. Along with tag lines such as “Music is the weapon!” and a contest to find the “baddest” player, it sounds like a quick shot at 90’s kid’s buck. *90’s kid: Duuuuuude-* But I must admit, there is a slight allure to something like this, as it sounds either a bit cool, or so lame it loops back to awesome. Let’s find out how it turns out with Revolution X, originally for the Arcades, but I’ll be playing a Sega Saturn port.

This game was initially developed and published by Midway, who, at the time, had a bigger arcade hit, Mortal Kombat. I mention this, because in terms of game sprites, a lot of Midway games had a “style”, and people who have played Mortal Kombat know what I mean. For those that don’t, it looks as if the makers of the game just dressed up people, took pictures or videotaped them and the pixelated it. The plus size is that it looks quite realistic, as it probably once was. The problem is that some things are just a mesh of indistinguishable pixels. You really can’t say “its style choice that makes things SUPPOSED to look weird” when something’s off, because we can tell what it should really look like. Also, this is a downgraded home port. I can only imagine it looks even worse on the Super Nintendo or Genesis ports.

As you could expect for the audio, there are a lot of Aerosmith songs used. These include Eat the Rich, Love in an Elevator, Rag Doll, Sweet Emotions and other classics. I just really wish I could hear it more, because this is one of those games where you will constantly be firing your gun. Since there’s no penalty for just holding down the trigger, all you’ll hear is the rattle of your gun. And enemies firing at you. And things in the background getting hit. And breaking, and shattering, and exploding, and thumping, and whirling-ugh! The constant noise gets overwhelming at a certain point.

As I might have already mentioned, this was originally a light-gun, rail-shooter game for the arcades. At its basics, it’s like most others; you follow a path, get to an area, kill the enemies before they kill you and then move on. As you play, you can find special weapons, power ups, hidden bonus items and secret paths. So what separates this game from others like it… besides Aerosmith of course? Well, one thing I really enjoyed is how much damage you can take. Unlike shooter games like Virtua Cop, where you need to be quick or else you’re out, in this game you have a pretty big life bar and can take many hits. Now granted, this was still originally an arcade game, so you can still die easily at some points. My point is that instead of worrying about not getting hit, reacting quickly and making sure you hit everyone before they hit you; you can just sit back, keep shooting and enjoy the blood splatters.

However, I’m talking about the port here, and there is a significant problem: it’s not compatible with the Sega Saturn Stunner (the light gun for the system). For some reason, when they decided to port this game to home consoles, they didn’t include that option. The game plays fine with the D-Pad and the cursor I guess, (I mean, I did beat the game) but it never felt as fast or accurate as a real gun. You can change the “looseness” of it, but no matter how you set it, you’ll probably be compromising.

Revolution X is the kind of game that I had a hard time taking seriously from the start, and quite frankly, that’s what saves it. If at any point I thought this game was taking itself seriously, I would just have to say that it fails. However, since it just seems to want to be a ridiculous game, I can only sit back and have fun with it. Granted, there are still a lot of things going against it: the graphics haven’t aged well, the sound just becomes noise, the game play isn’t really anything special and the port screwed up a couple of things. But like I said, it is fun, as I can just sit back and shoot some things while trying to be the dude that saves Aerosmith and youth culture. (Seriously, what about that last part doesn’t sound so bad, it’s good?) This is no Terminator 2 in terms of Arcade shooters by any means, and I will say the arcade version is a MUCH better experience. But for what this game has to offer, I think the fun overshadows the problems. I give Revolution X for the Sega Saturn 6.5 level out of 10.

Level Up: Pokemon Silver

I think it’s now time to take another look at the Pokemon series by moving to the 2^nd generation. I got to experience it through Pokemon Silver for the Game Boy Color.

Imagine this: you’re a 10 year old kid playing Pokemon, trying to be a master by finding every one there is. You know the Poke Rap by heart, so it’s just a matter of time. Then one day you learn of a Pokemon you’ve never heard of before. Immediately, you need to find out what this means. Now, though we could look stuff up online, back then it wasn’t as fluid with information like now. We would have to wait a bit, but eventually the news came out: a Pokemon game was coming with new Pokemon.

This was a dream come true. I don’t know anyone at that time that didn’t make their own “Fakemon” (I still have sketches of some of mine). Some of the first ones we knew about included Togepie (who was in the anime), Snubble and Marill (or as we knew him, “Pika-Blue”). As the game came closer to release date, we frantically searched for any hint of what we could look forward to.

Sorry if this little Nostalgia rant bored you, but it really is the basis for my feelings on this game.

Onto what has changed between games. I’ll start with my big complaint from the last time: the graphics. There is a HUGE improvement, and I don’t just mean that there’s now color: the sprites have been redone, so the Pokemon look more like they should.  A lot of the unbalanced moves were also fixed and enemy Pokemon now have the same move limit as you. However, the PC boxes still suck.

So what’s been added? Well, I think you already got the hint that there are new Pokemon, about 100 more. But with these new Pokemon came two new “types”: dark and steel. Considering the combinations and strategies you could come up with before, just adding 2 added a lot. This is also the only time types have been added so far.

Of the new Pokemon, special attention was also given to “Baby Pokemon”. These are Pokemon that weren’t found in the wild and are “pre-evolution” of ones that could be. You would do this by using the new breeding system: drop two Pokemon at the daycare and if they’re compatible, you should get an egg with one of their most basic forms. Carry that egg around for a while to hatch it.

Another drastic change is the addition of time. A clock was put in the game meaning that certain events would only happen at certain times. An innovative change… but I don’t really like it, basically because setting an alarm to catch “morning” Pokemon annoyed me. Maybe I would have liked it if there was just day and night, (can you tell I’m not a morning person?).

Other new things involved new ways to evolve Pokemon, a Pokemon’s ability to hold items, a phone feature, the apricorns that you could get made into special Pokeballs and other minute things like the ability to see your experience meter and whether or not you caught a Pokemon while you battle. All just a bunch of things to really iron out and add a bit to the Pokemon gaming system.

So that’s basically Pokemon Silver (and gold), which is basically an improvement on Pokemon Blue and Red. However, if we are to be perfectly honest, I don’t like the 2^nd Gen that much. Now, before you guys go for that unsubscribe button, let me explain: while I think it did advance the series a bit, it comes off as more of an “add-on” to the original generation in my eyes. It was like playing “Pokemon Blue and a half” to me. Now, don’t think that I’m going to say all Pokemon games after blue are just building on it and suffer for that (if that was the case, I would HATE the whole platforming genre except for Super Mario Brother). No, my problem is that it is TOO similar: it should have taken a giant leap forward, instead of a small hop. I felt like it was a new version of the same game. A very much improved version of a great game, but I had already played it. I give Pokemon Silver for the Game Boy Color 8.5 levels out of 10.