Mega Man 7
I often say I’m surprised by games at the least likely of moments.
Thus, is the case with Mega Man 7, the first true sequel of the Mega Man series of games on the Super Nintendo.
While it’s true that the Mega Man X games came out first on the SNES, “7” is a true successor of the NES line of games of which there were six, and five other Game Boy titles which shared similarities with their bigger brother.
The X series took the Mega Man stories in a different direction whereas “7” brought us back to the formula we were used too… or, yeah, it’s almost the same. The difference I believe is just being tied to the same ol’ Dr. Wily, who may as well be called Dr. Wile E., after the Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote, as neither can ever defeat their nemesis in the end.
The major wow factor of this game, especially when compared with the early SNES “X” titles, is that the graphics and sound would lead you to believe that this was not an SNES title: in this era of retro gaming remakes, you could’ve sworn this was a reboot of the series made in the present day.
That’s how good MM7 is, in my opinion.
It doesn’t really add much to the previous formula otherwise and that’s a good thing. The gameplay is what you expect, the bosses are just the right difficulty, and the controls are tight instead of cheap.
Alas, it’s still more of the same. I liken MM7 to the “Super” upgrades of every other game which came to the SNES, except it didn’t add a whole lot. Still, why fix something that isn’t broken?
That’s how I felt with MM7 and think any fan would enjoy the trip down memory lane as I did.
Super Punch-Out!!
I feel really bad saying this, but I thought this game was much better the way I remembered it. The obligatory upgraded everything with “Super” attached, Super Punch-Out!! took the game to the next level graphically, but the gameplay leaves something to be desired.
The NES original was a classic button masher which had a sense of urgency and intensity. You knew you could be wiped out if you didn’t have a certain rhythm, or if you didn’t time the opponent’s specialty punches.
In Super Punch-Out!! the specialty punches feel like a gimmick. They take the borderline feeling of being able to win (much like one or two of the Mario Kart games) and gets gimmicky to a point where the game is all about those punches: win or lose.
In this way, it feels cheap and underwhelming. Don’t get me wrong, I still like this game and feel it’s worth playing, but some of your standard punches are going to make it through, whereas the older game was all about ducking, dodging, and timing.
And for some reason, Doc Louis (Little Mac’s trainer in the NES original) is MIA too. (Actually, the fighter in the SNES version isn’t Little Mac either… he’s called whatever you name him.)
The saving grace is the flashy graphics, added animations, and audio.
There’s a little less of that here, and it looks more or less like the arcade title, but the game is still worth checking out if you’re doing the retro deal too.
Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball
I used to get terribly made fun of as a kid for many reasons. One of those was being the owner of a Super Nintendo while all of the “cool kids” owned a Sega Genesis.
For a period of time, that meant no cool games for poor little Joe. No Joe Montana Sports Talk Football. No World Series Baseball. No blood or violent fatalities in Mortal Kombat.
Then a game dropped out of the heavens that gave me some major bragging rights about the console I felt was superior. Nintendo partnered with Ken Griffey Jr., the biggest name in baseball in the mid 90’s, and created one of the greatest sports games ever.
While it’s true that Griffey was the only MLB player to appear in the game, due to a lack of MLBPA license, the real teams names, logos, and most importantly, stadiums, were all here. And honestly, that was the major appeal – aside from being the only true baseball game in town on the SNES, the audio track of the game had a pseudo play-by-play with “strikes” and “balls” being called on the clear console audio chip, but it was the near-to-life stadiums each team played in that really hooked me as a kid.
Fenway Park had the Green Monster. Orioles Park at Camden Yards had the warehouses in the outfield. The Royals field had the fountains in the outfield, among countless other special touches. Some homeruns were easier to hit where the ballparks had shorter fences, and even the Expos wall had the distance in metric unit measurements listed rather than the American “feet” distance.
And if you play in Canada, expect the Canadian National Anthem to play in lieu of the Star-Spangled Banner to open up games!
I never realized a few of the generic ballparks, such as the Pirates, weren’t as authentic due to space limitations on the cartridge, but that didn’t seem to matter: they played on Astroturf at the old Three Rivers, and as such, there was only dirt around each base – which helped mask that there wasn’t more detail for a couple of teams.
Even with a lack of “real players” the game used real stats and simply substituted each roster’s with a theme. For example, the Mariners used names of Nintendo of America employees, while the Phillies had a mix of local landmarks (L.Bell) and celebrities (R.Balboa and A.Creed). That lent to the arcade/cartoon style and feel of the game, with muscularly jacked up homerun hitters down to smaller base stealing players.
A roster editor built into the game allowed you to change the names of these players to their real-life counterparts, and anyone with a baseball guide or card collection could connect the dots to put in most of the player’s real names, further expanding on the depth of the game.
And speaking of detail: umpires and base coaches were even included on the field!
The controls were rather tight, and you could play a full season all the way through to the World Series. (Back then you played for the pennant!)
An added homerun derby mode, something which was a newer addition to the All-Star Game back then, was included – and you could also play the All-Star game too!
In all this was one helluva game that still, to this day, has a cult following akin to Tecmo Bowl with football. If you’ve never played any of the games in this series, they’re definitely worth checking out.
Note: Game is listed as “incomplete” in my ratings because I wasn’t going to play 80+ games – I had already done that several times as a kid! 😉
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time
In a previous review I had mentioned that the TMNT arcade game is one of my all-time favorites. As a child growing up, the Saturday morning cartoon was life.
The arcade game because a quarter-sucker for me and a literal cartoon brought to life by the Konami game, with up to four players able to play. The graphics were accurate, the audio lifted soundbytes and music from the series and just about every aspect of the game was perfect, as a beat-em-up that had you destroying hundreds of on-screen ninjas by its completion.
Much of that was carried over in the NES port of that game, TMNT 2. Yet, the translation left something lacking, as the game’s visuals and audio were altered for the underpowered original Nintendo. It added more enemies and added two entirely new levels with new bosses to lengthen the game.
That was great, but it felt like something was still missing.
The true sequel to the arcade game, Turtles in Time, is labeled as TMNT 4 on the Nintendo platform due to a third game, The Manhattan Project, being released on the NES during the end of its life cycle. Oddly, and not in a bad way, TMNT 3 borrowed the entire platform of the TMNT 2 port, down to the visuals and game play, creating an entirely new game which was a direct sequel to the NES title but not the arcade one.
Adding to the awkwardness is the timing of the game’s releases: TMNT 3, which borrows elements from Turtles in Time, released after the arcade version and only six months before the arcade game was ported to the new Super Nintendo.
Unlike TMNT 2 and TMNT 3, TMNT 4 (Turtles in Time) is a faithful recreation of the arcade classic. Everything that was in the original arcade game is retained, along with newer visuals, music, stages, and bosses. The turtles have some additional moves, and the game, even with it’s quirky time travel stages, melds the cartoon, movies, and toy line in harmony.
Also, unlike TMNT 3, this game doesn’t appear to extend levels by adding additional waves of the same enemies like its siblings. There are newer palate swap foot clan ninjas of course, but the update in technology in the arcade, as well as the horsepower of the SNES port, are on full display here.
The visuals are nearly identical to the arcade game, whereas the NES clones are not. A few unnoticeable effects were removed because of playing on a console, much of the stutter and glitchy-ness of 2 and 3 are gone. The game plays smooth as butter both from an animation and control standpoint.
Like the TMNT 2 translation, other changes were made, in particular to the bosses. The evil mutant turtle Slash appears in place of Cement Man (a great decision I may add) while the game also adds the Rat King (a major secondary villain in the cartoon) as well as Beebop and Rocksteady, who were absent from the arcade version.
The arcade sequel also includes the “fly” version of Baxter Stockman, who originally only appears in human form in the original arcade version, but replaced playing against the duo of Beebop and Rocksteady simultaneously on the NES TMNT 2 port. Other bosses from TMNT lore include Metalhead (or “Chrome dome” as he’s known in other mediums), Leatherhead (who appears in TMNT 3 also) plus Tokka and Rahzar (from the second movie) round out much of the roster.
Some of the auto-scroll levels were changed to bonus stages, with a new Shredder “battle tank” boss battle was added at the end of new Technodrome level.
The game ends with a climactic battle against a mutated “Super Shredder” much in the same vein as the end of the TMNT 3 NES game.
Overall TMNT 4 is one of the gold standards of arcade ports on the SNES. It showed just how powerful a home console could be, at a time when arcades were starting to die. Any fan of the games, cartoon, toys and/or movies would be hard-pressed to not give this game a look.
Super Mario World
How could you not love all of the Mario games?
Growing up, this was the penultimate Mario game. It took SMB3 and injected it with steroids. The graphics were better, sound was better, controls were tight, and everything just popped off of the screen.
Gameplay elements introduced here became cornerstones of the franchise, such as Yoshi, bonus worlds, hidden levels, and more.
Because I loved this game so much, I made sure I played through and beat every single stage, including each stage’s hidden exits: up to and including the incredibly nasty SPECIAL WORLD, which was a hidden world hidden within the hidden Star World. (Follow that?) These stages had names such as “Tubular” or “Gnarly” and they are incredibly difficult to defeat!
Of the levels in SMW, my favorites are:
“Top Secret Area” – A hidden level which was only one screen large but had multiple “?” blocks to give you powerups to help aide in beating other stages.
“Backdoor” – This was a secret way into Bowser’s Castle, which was much easier than defeating the rest of the final world.
“Sunken Ghost Ship” – Once you find out you can swim out into the ocean; the first board is a homage to Super Mario Bros. 3 and their airships. This one is sunk underwater and doubles as a ghost house too!
IMO while the “New” Super Mario Bros. games which followed are excellent, this may still be the best side-scrolling Mario game ever made. The NES games will always have a special place in my heart, but Mario World was not only a sequel, but just about smashed every expectation for a SMB game up until that point and even to the present day. It’s the benchmark to which all other platforming games should be held.
Pit-Fighter
One of the first arcade games to digitize actors into its graphics is one of the main reasons I remember Pit Fighter.
The game play is why I forgot it.
The novelty quickly wears off with the “advanced” graphics (which look horrible by today’s standards). You choose one of three fighters and get a set amount of “life” that must last through each subsequent level, with no continues. (You die, you start over.)
The life meter eventually builds back up, but the game can be really tough at times… and it recycles things far too often. The same stage/background is used throughout most of the stages. You will face the same 3-4 fighters including a “grudge match” mirror of the character you selected during each stage.
For some odd reason, when you win, you receive prize money while standing on a pallet which is raised by a forklift as you “ascend” the ranks. You can’t use the earnings to upgrade your fighter at all, and the score is probably a ceremonial type of thing that harkens back to “high scores” of early arcade games like Pac-Man or Space Invaders. (Note: The original Mortal Kombat had a scoring system too, but it went away in the sequels.)
Not sure if this was just a SNES limitation with cartridge size or not, but the same exact music is used for every single part of the game. It gets incredibly repetitive! (And a limitation of the console ports is that the crowd doesn’t interact with the fighters like the arcade version: which was one of the main draws of this game!)
But all of it was worth it for the awesome game ending, shown in my a screen capture in the gallery below.
Contra III: The Alien Wars
Like most SNES titles, Contra 3 is a worthy upgrade and successor to the original series. Upgraded features, graphics, sound, the whole she-bang.
I usually have a lot of things to say about a game, but other than this being frustratingly difficult at times, what is there to say? It’s a bigger/badder Contra and a must-play for anyone who enjoyed the original NES title.
PS – The dreaded top-down view levels, using the shoulder triggers to spin left/right are a pain in the butt! I know that’s a spin on the ol’ forward view of the previous games, but dang… what poor execution in my opinion!
Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3
Months following the fiasco that was Mortal Kombat 3, which stripped out many popular characters from the previous two MK titles, Midway answered their fans with UMK3.
Essentially borrowing everything from MK3, the “ultimate” remake corrected many of the complaints with the standard MK3 title. Scorpion, Reptile and Kitana are playable off the bat, as well as green palette swap female ninja Jade (who was previously a hidden unplayable character in MK2).
UMK3 on SNES also added two console-exclusive playable characters in more male palette swap ninjas Rain and Noob Saibot (who is a silhouette). Yet more palette swapped characters are available. Among them are the “classic” Sub-Zero and Ermac (male ninjas) and the returning Mileena.
The cyborg version of Smoke, an unlockable character in MK3 is now playable by default with his human form also unlockable: making for a total of 7 different colors of the same male ninja! The female ninja template is used three times as is the cyborg, which actually added to the cheese factor that, like it or not, was ingrained as part of MK’s Kung Fu movie-like theme. (Come on, that’s a fair statement! Did we take fatalities all that seriously either?)
To make room for all of the changes, MK3’s Sheeva, who does appear in the arcade version of UMK3, was removed from the SNES version. Some of her data can still be found via a bug in the options menus, allowing you to play with an “invisible” character and utilizing some of her moves. (A bug which I am proud to say I found long before cheats and the like were available via the Internet.)
The SNES version didn’t include the MK3 stages and instead, as part of cartridge limitations, only included the five new arcade levels. Animalities were removed with Brutalities added. Several finishers were altered or changed, particularly with the two console-exclusive ninjas.
In all, you can tell Midway got their act together. This was the definitive 16-bit MK title as it included the most playable characters and features of all those released. The arcade release coincided with MK3’s release on home consoles, so if you were paying attention at the time, you could’ve avoided the regular MK3 and waited for the ultimate (and better) edition to be released!
Mortal Kombat 3
Here’s a game that I get some flack for not liking: Mortal Kombat 3.
Front the get-go we don’t have the Roman numerals in the title and it goes downhill fast from there. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing technically wrong with the game itself. Graphics, audio, etc. are all updates which build on MK2. A run button was added so players couldn’t just sit on the defensive, you could breakthrough ceilings of stages to jump up and into a new area, the dumb but appealing Animalities were introduced as was a “Mercy” option to spare your opponent in lieu of finishing them off right away.
Where this game goes south is from the planning phases. I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to totally remove all of the palette swap ninjas, but they did. That meant no more Scorpion, Kitana, Mileena, Baraka or Reptile. Sub-Zero returned without a mask and with a completely different set of moves: a change which was incorporated into a storyline with the follow-up title Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.
But those weren’t the only players removed or changed. Johnny Cage, and Rayden were also no-shows. MK2 hidden ninja Smoke became a secret playable character who was converted into the third of three palette swapped cyborgs. Of the 15 total playable characters, only Shang Tsung (changed yet again) Liu Kang, Kung Lao and Jax came back from MK2. MK1 originals Sonya and Kato, missing from MK2, returned as well.
That should’ve been enough to get psyched up about, but losing Scorpion, a traditional Sub-Zero and Rayden was a lot to overcome when their replacements were Nightwolf (a Native American inspired warrior), Stryker (a police officer) and Kabal (who or what is Kabal?)
Another major change was substituting “Outworld” levels with playing on Earth. The more realistic stages weren’t bad, but with the removal of the fighters above, the game lost its Kung Fu movie vibe and, in my opinion, felt stale. Both MK2 bosses, Shao Kahn and Motaro also returned, adding to what felt like an overall lack of creative direction.
Again, this isn’t a terrible game in the sense of playing it. Had this been MK1, it may have been a major hit. However, the missing characters and old school ninja movie theme detracted from what could’ve been a solid sequel.
Stay tuned for my review of UMK3, where Midway attempts to make up for these changes and does a decent job doing so.
Wayne’s World
Hey Joe, they made a SNES game based on Wayne’s World and I think you should play it.
Shyeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt!
But low and behold, I did play it. This was right next to that WCW game in the “W” section of my collection and made me do a double take. Is that Wayne’s World?! THE GAME?!
Let’s cut to the chase. You already know this is a terrible game. You didn’t even need to look past the box art to figure that much out.
What I can’ figure out is this: who thought it was a good idea to market this game? And what poor game developer had to work on this steaming pile of poo?
That aside, the cutscenes for the game are funny, but that’s about where the fun ends. You start as a half CG, half digitized Wayne, complete with a guitar that “riffs” at animated enemies like coffee cups and drumsets. You walk around each level until you realize you cannot go any further. Then you double back and fall into an area, unable to jump back to where you were until you wander into another dead end.
Rinse. Repeat.
You literally have no clue where you’re going because the graphics are so cluttered with the same repeating garbage that every single screen looks nearly identical. The enemies also respawn, leaving you with no indication if you’ve been in a given area before while trying to find your way out.
Once you do find your way out, Garth is there. Party on, right?
Wrong.
A giant purple hand comes from the side of the screen and pulls Garth away. You then get warped to what looks like the start of the same stage, but it’s just the next level that looks exactly like the previous one. (That happens a few times.)
There are no plot points telling you why you’re in a stage that looks like Honey I Shrunk the Kids in a Coffee Shop, nor do you know why this hand takes Garth away, but then he’s on the couch talking to you between levels.
Actually, there’s no telling what level you’re on because it never says it on the screen other. Oh yeah, and there are “boss fights” too. I fought some mechanical dinosaur snake lizard thing at the end of what I assume is World 1.
But wait there’s more! Wayne has “special moves” which I have no clue what most of them are outside of “Schwing!” which looks like a combination of Wayne air humping and a nuclear bomb detonation.
This game is truly trash and as much as I was chuckling at it, the novelty quickly wore off and I stopped playing. It goes where it belongs, on the blacklist!