Day 135: All-Star Weekend 2008 with Tommy Lasorda Baseball

You know how I'm alway bitching that I never know which randomly chosen fielder I'm controlling in most baseball video games? Well Tommy Lasorda Baseball solves that problem and gives me something brand new to bitch about: the robot voice that yells out which fielder is active every time a ball is hit into play. It doesn't completely solve the problem, since it's still hard to tell which little guy is which sometimes on the extremely jumbled fielding screen.


Let's see, here we have six members of the pitching team, two umpires, two base coaches, three base runners and three more base runners on the field map in the bottom right corner of the screen. Notice how it looks like there's a man running from first to home about to collide with the batter running to first? That's not confusing at all in the heat of the game.

Tommy Lasorda is a pretty average representative of the last generation of baseball games before they were all replaced with baseball simulators. Pitch movement is still controlled using the d-pad rather than just selecting curve or slider and aiming. There are no real teams. No real players. No real stadiums. No real stats. In other words, Tommy Lasorda Baseball looks and plays like pretty much every other 8-bit and 16-bit baseball game out there.


That's not necessarily a bad thing. The game moves fast and is easy to figure. It feels familiar because it is. Tommy Lasorda Baseball lacks both the personality of earlier games like Bad News Baseball and the realism and depth of later games like the MVP and MLB series. It's sort of stuck somewhere in between the baseball game and the baseball simulator.

Day 122: Normy's Beach Beach Babe-O-Rama

I believe you've met Normy. He's the middle aged guy with the ugly clothes and flip flops. He may insist on growing his hair into a ponytail even though he's been bald since he was 24. He's got something you don't and he knows it. So do all the women you try to meet. They say it's "experience." It's actually the Porsche Boxster convertible which they don't know is the crappy Porsche. So when aliens kidnap all these vapid, shallow women, why on earth would we want to help Normy rescue them?


Honestly, I don't. I wish the aliens had taken Normy too. The fewer of these people we have, the better off the entire planet would be. But Normy's little adventure makes for a decent video game. It has some nice cartoony animations, even if the graphics are too pixely to really make the look work as well as it should. The puzzles are solvable without being insulting to my intelligence. If only I wasn't rooting for Normy to fail, I'd really enjoy playing this one.

Day 109: Cosmic Spacehead

Finally! The excitement of a point and click PC game has come to my Sega Genesis! No longer will I have to waste my time playing those dreadful, fast paced blue hedgehog games. At last! Pointing to objects on the screen with a cursor! Picking them up! Using them! God! It's like heaven!


Alas! All is not perfect, not even in paradise. The blue hedgehog has corrupted paradise with his infernal running an leaping. Alright, more like walking and hopping. Curse you, blue hedgehog! Why must you destroy everything you touch?


I won't let you get away with this! No, no, my friend. Two can play at this game! And I won't stop with pointing and clicking! No, sir! There will be game boards and cards! Yes, cards! Prepare for my wrath, blue hedgehog! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Day 85: Spiritual Warfare

Spiritual Warfare could have been a nice little Zelda clone if the makers would have been a little more subtle with their Christian message. Unfortunately, like most Christian entertainment, they choose to hit the audience over the head repeatedly with the baseball bat of enlightenment, lest they miss the point entirely. Case in point: random bible trivia!


Every so often an angel will appear giving you the chance to earn doves, which are currency in Fundamentalist Land, by correctly answering Bible questions. The questions are so easy that I managed to get nearly all of them right despite being able to count the number of church services I've attended in my life without removing my shoes.

The rest of the game is spent hunting for various religious artifacts and blasting sinners with the Fruit of the Spirit to turn them repentant. Exactly what sin this biker is committing remains a mystery to me.


Once blasted, the sinners, easily recognized as being almost everyone but yourself, immediately fall to their knees and begin praying. Some leave money behind. The particularly bad ones release the demon that was possessing them, which you must promptly blast with your Fruit.

I guess the message I'm supposed to take away from Spiritual Warfare is that everyone is a sinner. Most of the "enemies," with the exception of a few knife-wielding thugs, are normal people and none of them, not even the thugs, make any overt attempts at harming the protagonist. They all simply move about in their predetermined patterns until you force the Word down their throats.


As a Zelda-style dungeon crawl, Spiritual Warfare isn't terrible. It would have worked much better as a quest to find lost religious artifacts rather than a crusade to purify every guy who happens to cross your path on the way to work. Too bad the fundamentalist belief that everyone is your enemy got in the way of what otherwise could have been a decent game.

Day 64: The Tick

How many ninjas can you punch before your hand cramps? If you don't know, play The Tick to find out. Strangely, despite being released after the mainstream success of the animated series, the video game is based entirely on the comic book series. What was a hilarious commentary on America's obsession with all things ninja in 1988 is badly dated in 1994 and looks like a cop out by the programmers who were able to populate an entire video game by recoloring one sprite.


There's no reason to mince words here. This game is a complete waste of the character. It's nothing but another mindless beat 'em up. In fact, the only remotely imaginative thing in this game, the ability to occasionally team up and fight back to back with Oedipus and Paul the Samurai (characters most kids playing this game, having only watched the cartoon, would have never seen before) just makes the game more difficult. Moving the large, slow, two headed beast of justice while fighting small, fast ninjas is a pain.


Almost no effort was put into the sprites besides The Tick and the ninjas. Oedipus and Paul are sloppily drawn and even more sloppily animated. Enemies like Sagin, the Red Scare and Clark Oppenheimer (again, characters most playing would be unfamiliar with) look like they were dropped in at the last minute when someone told the programmers there needed to be more to the game than punching ninjas. The Human Bullet (finally, someone from the cartoon) is so badly rendered that he appeared appeared four times before I realized what he was.

The Tick the video game is just bad. It's ugly and repetitive and, worst of all, it's not even a little but funny. Also, but focusing on the comic book for source material, it alienated probably 90% of its audience, who were looking for a game with Dinosaur Neil, El Seed and Thrakkorzog but instead got Running Guy.

Day 58: Aah! Harimanada

It's a good thing overweight people are the one group it's still socially acceptable to make fun of in this country, because this game's got more fat guys in it than the line at a $4.99 all you can eat buffet. I haven't seen this much raw tonnage concentrated in one spot since the last time Oprah Winfrey went on safari.


Okay, enough kidding around. To most of the world, sumo wrestling is just a bunch of fat guys in big diapers shoving each other around. To the small minority who truly understand it, sumo is the tradition rich, highly disciplined sport of fat guys in big diapers shoving each other around. The programmers responsible for Aah! Harimanada definitely fall into the majority. According to them, sumo is a sport of fat guys charging blindly at each other and pounding buttons, hoping to stumble upon the combination that will throw the other fat guy out of the ring but usually failing and getting thrown out themselves.


If you find other fighting and wrestling games to complex, Aah! Harimanada, with its small playing area and moveset that consists entirely of slapping and grabbing, might be just the game for you. However, you would be in the minority, along with people who like Intellivision controllers and bought a Lynx instead of a Game Boy. In a perfect world, it would be socially acceptable for me to publicly ridicule you people but, unless you're also grossly obese, I will have to keep my disgust to myself. For now.

Day 36: Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt!

Awesome Possum could have been very popular with kids who'd never played Sonic the Hedgehog before and didn't mind having social issues crammed down their throats with digitized cries of "That's awesome!" Awesome is an anthropomorphic hedgehog opossum with "attitude" who has to defeat the evil Dr. Robotnik Machino to save the world. I'm surprised the makers of this game went with Awesome instead of breaking out the old Roget's thesaurus and finding a synonym for Sonic.

Awesome Possum might have been just a slower version of Sonic the Hedgehog, but it wanted to do something more. It wanted kids to care about the environment. And if collecting discarded recyclables and fighting robot loggers in the rain forest doesn't get the point across, maybe this will:


How many gallons of oil would have been saved by not manufacturing and shipping this game? Honestly, bible games are less preachy than Awesome Possum.

As a game, it fairs even worse than it does as a brainwashing tool. The controls are sloppy and unresponsive, making the game more difficult than something with AI this terrible really should be. Robots sometimes just walk off ledges to their deaths. Others simply go about their duties of deforestation, completely oblivious to Awesome's presence.


There's absolutely nothing awesome about Awesome Possum. That's right. I said it. Hey, the makers of the game didn't go out of their way to be creative, so why should I?

Day 14: Splatterhouse 3

I planned on just copying yesterday's blog, changing the 2's to 3's and calling it a day. Not only would that have been pure comedy gold, it would have saved me a lot of time. But those bastards went and changed the formula.

They didn't change it much. Rick still has to fight his way through a creepy old mansion full of hideous monsters to rescue Jennifer. Now he can move in all four directions, combo punches, throw enemies and preform spinning kicks, making Splatterhouse 3 play more like Double Dragon than Splatterhouse.


Instead of a straight shot to the end, there are now several different paths through each level. But if you want to get the the end before time runs out and Jennifer meets her horrible grisly end, you'll only get to see about a third of each stage. Don't worry if she does die. The game will go on, you'll just get one of the many alternate endings.

In addition to the weapons lying around the mansion (including the return of the 2x4), Rick now collects power crystals which give him the ability to transform into a large, powerful (but very slow) beast for a limited time.


The change in gameplay means that monsters no longer burst open after one or two punches. It now takes several shots to down each one, and most of them do nothing more than fall backwards and writhe a little before dissolving. Rick doesn't swing the 2x4 like a baseball bat anymore, splattering zombies against the far wall. Rather, he clubs them over the head and they just fall to the floor.

The ooze and puss that burst forth with every attack is what gave the first two Splatterhouse games personality. Now the game is little more than Final Fight in creepy zombie land.

Day 13: Splatterhouse 2

If you read comic books in 1990 (or found some comic books from 1990 years later in the 25 cent bin of a dealer desperate to get rid of them), you saw the double-page ads for the original Splatterhouse. It and Bonk's Adventure were the only Turbografx-16 games to receive any substantial marketing. To this day those games are probably recognized by more people than the system that played them.

Unbeknownst to all but the most hard-core gamers (including myself until very recently), two Splatterhouse sequels were released for the Sega Genesis.


Splatterhouse 2 sticks closely to the model established by the first game. Rick learns that his girlfriend Jennifer did not die as it appeared in the first game, dons the Terror Mask and returns to the burned ruins of the West Mansion to punch a lot of squishy zombie things.

Along with his fists, Rick has an arsenal of found weapons at his disposal. The shotgun returns, but now Rick has access to chainsaws, potassium bombs and a large bone, all of which add to the carnage.


There are a lot more gooey details in the sequel than the original. Monsters burst open rather than simply crumble into a puddle of slime. The trade-off is the music, which is no where near as creepy and atmospheric as in the first game. And Rick's echoey "Ow" has been replaced with a simple grunt.

Splatterhouse's appeal as never the original gameplay. It's solid and challenging, but hardly unique. It's the addition of copious amounts of gore and wonderfully rendered creatures that make the franchise stand out.

Day 9: Chakan - The Forever Man

Actually, it only feels like forever. What I thought was going to be a mindless hack 'n' slash turned out to be one of the most excruciatingly difficult games I've ever played.


Chakan is cursed with immortality. In comic books and video games, immortality is always a curse that can only be broken once some impossible task is completed. Maybe if these guys spent their immortality enjoying life rather than working all the time, it wouldn't be such a curse.

Chakan's task is to rid the world of supernatural evil, which he does by whacking it with a sword. If he gets to it. Each level is filled with intricate jumps and endless tiny, hard to hit enemies as well as the occasional large, impossible to kill enemy.

And the game never ends. In what was a novel idea for the time, there are no lives. Every time Chakan falls into a pit, he simply returns to that level's entrance and tries again. The cycle repeats until the Genesis is unplugged and thrown into the wall in frustration.


Nothing about this game makes me want to put in the time it would take to get good at it. If I win, Chakan doesn't get the girl or save the world. He dies. This is just a murky, depressing pain in the ass.