Donkey Kong Country Returns

"How dare he have teeth" say the hardcore Donkey Kong squad. "DK should not have teeth - he should suck his way through life like in 1994. These new bones have ruined the franchise!"

And the Squirrel says, heed not what these simpletons speak of. And that's not just because you can see Donkey Kong's toothy grin in his 1980 arcade debut, but because teethy Donkey Kong Country Returns, despite not being born in Leicestershire and despite it's unhealthy obsession with Wii Remote waggle, is a great game. It's a welcome change from bongos and shoulder buttons, and one of the few Wii games worth bothering about in the near future.

Super Meat Boy

It's as if Newgrounds are making new grounds in the world of gaming. This is Super Meat Boy, released a few weeks ago on Xbox Live Arcade, PC, and Mac. A frighteningly difficult platformer that's seen nothing but critical acclaim from the press. And for good reason I suppose.

The SHPDMBGWL4 Christmas Special, 2010

Because everyone's Christmas needs to be spoiled

Look, it's another SHPMDBGWL4 Christmas special which you can download. It's an unfinished mess of a game built within about five days with very little gameplay value at all, but it's something.... I think.

Anyway, Merry Christmas. Might not be wise to spend it reading this blog though.

Sexy Parodius

Sounds sexy

Say, what's better than Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius? Lots of things, actually, but you can count on Sexy Parodius being one of them. The last in the series worth caring about, Sexy Parodius goes that extra mile to make sure it could never be sold in the west by cramming the game full of women in swimsuits to extract your revenge against feminism on. But don't be put off by its title - this isn't filled with intensive bedroom fun. In fact... there's no nudity at all.

Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius

Sounds... chatting

Say what's better than Gokujō Parodius?.. I'm not too sure. Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, or "Chatting Parodius Live" is the fourth game in the series and gives it a go. This one has a running commentary... in Japanese. Perhaps you can see why I'm not as thrilled with this one.

Gokujō Parodius (Fantastic Journey)

Sounds fantastic

Say, what's better than Parodius Da!? The sequel, Gokujō Parodius of course. Those in the know know that its English title is "Fantastic Journey", but I'm not one for breaking naming conventions for the sake of one game.

Gokujō Parodius comes from a time where new entries in the Gradius series were nonexistent, and so on a technical level, it stands out as being a hundred times better than the game it set out to parody. Basically that means in 1994, the best Gradius game wasn't even a Gradius game at all.

Mission in Snowdriftland

My favourite advent calandar is back this year - Mission in Snowdriftland. It's wonderful.

Developed by a group named Extra Toxic, this online flash platformer was originally attached to Nintendo as a way of plugging DS and Wii games for the Christmas season. That was a couple of years ago, and during that time fans (including myself) wanted to see this thing become a commercial product.

That has yet to happen (though the Easter-based cousin, Chick Chick Boom is apparently on WiiWare these days), but it has returned in its original form for 2009 with an non-Nintedo indie games theme. Play it while you can.

Parodius Da!

Konami are an interesting group of developers. They make an extremely popular horizontal shoot-'em-up (Gradius) and then seek to parody it with Parodius. Parodius Da! is the second in the series, following an MSX game that nobody has played and hasn't stood the test of time. It's brilliant, and you should play it.

Top Gear 2

Tonight, I take this Mega Drive game round our track, and a violent goose is the star in our reasonably priced car.

Look, it's the Clarkson-less Top Gear 2, the sequel to... well... guess. Among other systems it was brought to the Sega Mega Drive, and is a fine example of a pseudo 3D racing game from the early 1990s. I don't talk about these sorts of games much, so here's an opportunity for me to do so.

Sonic 2 LD

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Master System is a nice game in its own right, but having been built by an entirely different team for a completely different console, it doesn't look much like its more famous Mega Drive counterpart.

But look, Doc Eggfan and co of Sonic Retro fame have changed all that. It's Sonic 2 as you remember it running on Master System hardware... sort of.

Frozen Bubble

I seem to spend a lot of time being screwed around with last minute cancellations and two hour breaks to kill. So fortunate then that I have an Android "smartphone" with enough freebie software to keep a Linux fan thrilled for life.

Frozen Bubble is one such piece of software. A completely free Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move clone which has already absorbed several hours of my time.

Billy the Kid Returns

Well... this is bad.

Billy the Kid Returns, another remnant from my DOS-based childhood. It was developed by a company known as "Alive Software", but trust me, this one's better off dead. Billy the Kid is a prime example of a truly poor and flimsy title worth the time of no man.

So lets spend some time finding out why!

Arcade Classics

Classic game compilations are great. With the power of modern technology the expensive arcade machines of years long past can now be played in the comfort of your own home, for cheap, instantly. Of course in some cases such as when Sega hop on the re-release train, you don't get the best results. Sega's classic "cat in a blender" additions to many Mega Drive musical scores repeatedly give your childhood that extra level of cringe, but others seem to do a reasonable job.

But what were things like before the days of emulation? Like this, Arcade Classics on the Sega Mega Drive (and Sega Game Gear). Can they get it right? Is it even possible to get Pong wrong? Better find out.

Mega Man (Game Gear)

American culture is an odd thing. Arriving on the internet full-time in late 2003, I was told that a FIGHTING ROBOT known as "Mega Man" was the bees knees among "most gamers". This theory was based on supposedly two decades of success and many childhood NES-related memories. Shocking, then, that I had never played nor even heard of a Mega Man game up until this point. Was I missing something?.. aside from a NES?

Well, if I had I known about the series, it might have been through this. Mega Man on the Game Gear. Other contenders are Mega Man: The Wily Wars on the Mega Drive, or something like Mega Man X3 on the Saturn... though being honest it's unlikely I would have came across any of them, and I couldn't have played this one since it wasn't released in the UK. But it's an entry to the series that isn't discussed much, so that makes it ideal for Blog Squirrel treatment.

Jumpjet

A fan of Luigi alerted me of this game. A Defender clone for DOS, released in 1990. It may look simplistic, but simplicity is one hell of a lot easier to blog about than the stuff I've been trying to push out for the last week... and it's got a few tricks up its sleeve which makes it that extra bit special.

Fire & Ice (Master System)

The Winter months are drawing near, and according to Procter & Gamble of Pringles crisps fame, the Christmas season starts in September now. So time to don your woolly hats and play something slightly festive.

It's Fire & Ice... for the Sega Master System. Why haven't I gone for the Amiga copy? Because I have no interest in messing with WinUAE on this laptop. Fire & Ice is one of those games I've known about for most of my life, but haven't had the urge to sit down and play until now. As with many games that originated in the first half of the 90s, you just expect they're mediocre platformers attempting to fit the gap which Nintendo were best at filling.

Commando (C64)

This game's theme song has been stuck in my head for the best part of a week. An impressive feat for a twenty five year old Commodore 64 title I hadn't played until now.

Commando is regarded as some sort of C64 classic these days. I know very little about the C64 scene so I guess I better find out why.

Sonic Fan Remix

Hey I'm not too thrilled about saving it as a JPEG either, but this is indeed a playable Sonic Fan game running in real time on this computer. It's the talk of the town at the moment - a fangame designed by Sonic Retro users pelikan13 and Mercury which, even if you're not a massive fan of the strange art styles employed here, completely wipes the floor with Sonic the Hedgehog 4.

Built with the Unity 3D engine, Sonic Fan Remix is a three level demo which surprisingly still looks great on slightly under-powered hardware. Things to note are an almost perfect physics engine and of course all those neat graphical effects. I can't say I agree with all the graphical and audio choices, but it's certainly the most impressive Sonic fan game I've ever seen... don't know about you.

The topic of discussion can be found here, though do note that thanks to the likes of Kotaku a lot of download mirrors have died hosting this thing. Nevertheless, fantastic stuff and certainly worth your while.

Super Skidmarks

A.k.a. Super Off Road II: Super Off Road Harder.

There were a lot of games like this in the 1990s because rendering racing games from any other perspective put huge strains on the hardware. This one, which by the way contains no skidmarks whatsoever, is a little-known game developed by Acid Software and published by Codemasters (of Micro Machines fame) for the Sega Mega Drive (and the Amiga... and once again the trainwreck that was the Amiga CD32) in 1995. It's not too shabby.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 1

uuhhh ahhh eerrhhh

Star Wars: Episode 1 is a nice movie but I'll admit, it is a bit far-fetched to claim it's "just as good and relevant" as the original trilogy... well at least without filling the gap with episode 2 and 3, anyway. Until quite recently I had simply thought the Jar Jar Binks hate squad were running low on chill pills, but now I'm starting to understand their frustration.

Because this is Sonic the Hedgehog 4, the Sonic fan's equivalent to pod racing. It shouldn't exist, yet here it is to ruin our childhoods.

Wario Land 3 (Mega Drive)

NMMX of Sonic Retro has done the world a favour by dumping this slightly infamous hack of the Mega Drive platformer, Puggsy. There were a couple of videos floating around YouTube, with all sorts of uneducated simpletons claiming this was some sort of amazing pirate original.

Is it worth caring about? Well if it gets more people to play Puggsy I suppose so. It's a very bare bones hack which essentially just replaces the title screen, credits, and Puggsy sprite (as well as removing the Sega logo), but Puggsy is a very good game, sporting great graphics and sound for the time as well as PHYSICS. There's also a version for the Mega CD.

Oh and a fun fact for you - supposedly Puggy's anti-piracy tactics are still in-tact here so make sure SRAM is disabled on your emulator.

Super Off Road

In the early 90s, everything was super. From the fun houses to the star wars to the Metroids. But this is Super Off Road, in which the road isn't just super, it's off. Someone should have eaten it quicker.

Dick Vitale's "Awesome, Baby!" College Hoops

Every generation spawns a certain class of video games that are doomed to never have a future. EA's licensed sports titles are the obvious culprits as I've mentioned before, because regardless of how great the game was back in the day, nobody wants to buy FIFA 98 in 2010. They have a shelf life of about nine months.

But here's something even worse! A basketball game (with commentary by Dick Vitale) based around North American college basketball teams. It's not even the real NBA deal here! How many of these nails does it want in its coffin?

BioShock

Arrrgh

Perhaps I've been spending too much time with obscure gems from the past, but I'd have thought that playing broken software from two decades ago would give me a new found love for the blockbusters of today. Yet I can't shake this feeling that BioShock, the supposed 96-point masterpiece by 2K Games, is also a piece of broken software too. I'm having to question my own taste in video games - not a single person in the gaming press gave BioShock a score of less than 80%, and some people have the audacity to give it a perfect score. What's going on? When did I develop a dislike for this genre? Why don't I like this game?

Rainbow Islands Extra

Well I don't know about you but Taito's classic, Rainbow Islands, just doesn't have enough Darius in it. Guess we'll have to fix that.

Rainbow Islands Extra. Yes it's real, and it's not a fan-made hack (which was my assumption at first). This is Taito's Rainbow Islands combined with Taito's Darius shoot-'em-up franchise (sorry, no kings of Persia here). I can't say I understand why such a game needs to exist, but it does, and I'm here to review it... sort of.

Golden Axe II

Well it's a better idea than removing status bars. We don't all use netbooks.

Golden Axe II, one of many sequels to Golden Axe. Released exclusively on the Sega Mega Drive in 1991, it's a sequel few seem to remember these days, but those who do recall its existence also pair it with the fact it's pretty much identical to the original game, and in many ways worse. Most therefore look towards Golden Axe III for salvation, but I'm here to ruin your day with number 2. Because I'm crazy like that.

You got Green Hill Zone in my Sonic Crackers

I'm sure you're all fans of Sonic Crackers!... no? I don't blame you, but I've been fascinated by this one since I first saw it mentioned in an old copy of the Official Dreamcast Magazine.

Anyway it might have taken a decade, but Selbi of Sonic Retro has actually turned Sonic Crackers into something interesting. Sort of. Now you can play through a very dodgy rendition of Green Hill Zone, with extremely broken collision and other glitches. But hey, it's pretty much the first notable Sonic Crackers hack, and that's a start right?

Crack Down (Mega Drive)

I've put Nintendo on the firing range a few times for their obsession with re-releasing the same old tat (Urban Champion) time and time again, but since the Virtual Console's birth in 2006, news of first-generation NES re-releases are now few and far between. Sega, on the other hand, have made great strides in trying to take Nintendo's place in the "re-release wars", flushing out yearly Sega Mega Drive compilations comprising of their early 16-bit releases. Logic states you should release the older games before the newer ones, but Sega often seem to get a bit bored by about 1992 and move onto a new system to fill with Eccos and Golden Axes. And they don't like touching their other consoles.

Crack Down is one of the many first party Mega Drive games that Sega seem to love. Originally a 1989 Sega System 24 game (I'd be reviewing that version if it were emulated properly), it was brought to the Mega Drive in 1991. But does anyone really care?

Grand Theft Auto IV

hmm

Hey Niko Bellic, you "eastern European" Bosnian war veteran out to hunt down other Bosnian war veterans while fighting against Russians, Albanians and Italians... welcome to America! Why are you here? Because... erm... well... it's Grand Theft Auto IV, the 2008 spectacular aiming to prove for the fifth time that Liberty City is a great place to live, and we're too frightened to change the setting. According to Metacritic this game is two points away from perfection, and as I love other GTA games, it had to be one of my top purchases when getting an Xbox 360. Yet something doesn't feel right about this one...

Wacky Races (NES)

Out of all the Hanna Barbera shorts produced in the 60s and 70s, Wacky Races stands out as being one of the only franchises that lends itself well to video games. So as you can imagine, the bigwigs have tried to make it into a Mario Kart clone to steal cash from kids. But the franchise hasn't been damaged too much - the Dreamcast game was nice and the Game Boy Color game ended up being a fairly big deal.

But that's not to say it hasn't had its fair share of garbage. Perhaps the weirdest adaptation of the franchise is this 1992 PLATFORMER for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Though it is indeed fair to say that perhaps the NES couldn't handle a third-person perspective racer, by 1992 there was a perfectly capable SNES console that Atlus could have supported. Instead they chose to tie it to an inappropriate genre to catch the last waves built up by Super Mario Bros. 3.

Commander Keen (GBC)

Yeah I'm running low on ideas.

A younger, more naive me had this game bought for me as a Birthday present not too long after it was released. Feeling that my eleven-year-old self was smarter than Nintendo's hardware manufacturing and marketing divisions, I had come to the conclusion that this would run on my Game Boy Pocket. It didn't. But it did run on my Game Boy Advance when I picked one of those up in the coming months.

Commander Keen 5: The Armageddon Machine

It frightens me that in this day and age there are still people out there who claim to be "gamers" that haven't played Commander Keen. To these people: what the hell is wrong with you?

Back in the day, Commander Keen was by far one of the best games on the planet... and other planets for that matter. Having since ventured onto the internet it now ranks in my books as not only being a great set of platformers, but also some of the finest examples of 16-colour EGA graphics ever known to man. No game before nor afterwards has topped the Commander Keen series (especially the latter half) while working with these limitations. As I've said before, it did such a good job that it took my nearly ten years for me to realise its palette was ¹/₁₆th the size of later DOS platformers.

Rock n' Bolt

At the time of writing I've played roughly half of the SG-1000's library. It's not overly surprising why Sega's first console failed - 90% of its games library came from Sega themselves. Nobody supported this thing!

Even Rock n' Bolt here which started life of as one of Activision's creations was ported to the console by Sega. I looked at this one on SMS Power and instantly came to the conclusion that it was tat... before playing it and realising it isn't.

Hocus Pocus

Often when you read people reminiscing about their DOS-based childhoods Hocus Pocus is conjured up during conversation. It doesn't make much of an impact, but it does result in a few nods of approval.

And indeed, Hocus Pocus played a minor part in my childhood too, but the difference is... I've never seen its appeal. Granted I've never been into the whole "magic" "fantasy" thing - I have a feeling that even the earliest of firearms could puncture a dragon's face, but Hocus Pocus always struck me as a very bland platformer that performs worse than games made three years before it. It's one of the few games out there that manages to be overrated and underrated at the same time.

Bio Menace

The good data type Char of MFGG fame raised a interesting point the other day. There's no Bio Menace posts on Blog Squirrel. That's can't be allowed to continue.

Bio Menace for DOS computers is perhaps one of the greatest platform-shooters of all time. While many American kids with their Nintendo Entertainment Systems ran around the flickering and predictable worlds of Mega Man, cooler British kids such as myself were guiding sunburned men with mullets through sixteen colour cities, shooting aliens and saving equally red citizens. You didn't get that on Nintendo... though at the time you didn't get anything on Nintendo here until it was obsolete.

Sonic Blast

Pre-rendered fun for everyone.

We like to forget Sonic Blast exists. As a Game Gear (and Master System title if you're living in Brazil) game released in the extremely late year of 1996, it's always been tarred with the "average" brush and shoved aside in favour of other 1996 Sonic disasters, such as Sonic 3D: Flickies' Island. Sad then that it was actually the last 2D "classic" Sonic platformer with its own set of new levels.

It's an odd game, but surely in these days of endless mediocre Sonic titles we can start caring for it... right?

Elfland

ELFLAND. Oh how the title makes your mind go wild. What could possibly lie beyond this line of text? A fun Christmas-themed game in the style of Super Mario Land? A on old DOS platformer from my childhood whose existence I forgot about until writing this sentence and will probably blog about it in the near future? Of course not... it's an unlicensed NES game from "Tip Top" in 1992.

And wouldn't you know it, it has absolutely nothing to do with elves. It's actually a strange Bubble Bobble clone, without the bubbles or bobbles. The catch this time is to eliminate your enemies by changing colour in a de Blob style manner, and if it had been presented a little better... it might have been quite nice.

ASDER 20-in-1

An update to The Obscure Research Project? Madness.

I'm not all that sure what posessed me to play through this pirate NES compilation, but I did, and and here's the page to prove it. Unlike most compilations it's not just a bunch of stolen games tied to a menu, but is, in fact, 20 completely original titles... well okay some are hacks... but still, not many people will have played these games before.

I don't know Nintendo's history as well as Sega's so chances are there might be a few more hacks included in this compilation. I spotted Crush Roller (or Make Trax) but there might be others so you might have to take this with a pinch of salt and I'll update it at a later date.

NHLPA Hockey '93

Yeah I went there. Take a trip to your local second hand game shop or eBay sometime. Have a look at all the sports titles. See how they're sold for ridiculously low prices and watch as you find yourself asking "who buys this stuff". There's no doubt about it, the entire sports genre is the very definition of "shovelware", and it's mostly Electronic Arts' fault for shipping this stuff out annually.

So I picked a game at random to see if the older titles once praised by the press are still worth playing today. This is NHLPA Hockey '93 for the Sega Mega Drive, the second in EA's NHL series. My experience with both Ice Hockey games and the sport itself is quite limited (I think I might have played a demo for a later game on the PlayStation once at a friends' house... that's it), so can an eighteen year old game make me into a fan today? Let's find out (spoilers: it can't).

Gex

Yeah that's right, on the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. You can hear the cheers of excitement.

Before the Gex series started introducing strange stories and stupid characters there was this, the original 1994 2D platforming game that gave people a reason to buy the 3DO console... until it was shipped to better platforms a couple of years later. But how does the original Gex hold up today?

Snow Bros.

In 1997 the first decent NES emulator, NESticle, was released. Not long after that, people started hacking the first Super Mario Bros. game, sticking everyone and their aunt in the place of Mario and releasing their efforts to the world. At one point I actually had a collection of these, and most were horrible. Problem is, when you start having hoards of hacks being called "xxx Bros." you forget of the real games that copied Mario Bros' naming scheme.

Like Snow Bros., an arcade game released by Toaplan in 1990. It was Toaplan's answer to Bubble Bobble, except it was released four years after Taito's creation and few people cared for it as a result. I, however, think it is a great game. Here's why.

Penguin Land

I don't know about you but when I lay an egg I don't spend my days rolling it around on the surface of the moon. Somebody does though!

This is Penguin Land for the Sega Master System. It's part two of a history of Doki Doki Penguin Land games that nobody remembers (the Japanese name for this game is "Doki Doki Penguin Land: Uchuu Daibouken", and it follows "Doki Doki Penguin Land"). This one had the advantage of being released outside of Japan, though you'll still be struggling to find people who remember it as a classic.

Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan

what how when why

China, my greatest foe. And my greatest ally. Actually to be honest I don't really know China and it doesn't really know me, but I do know of the products it produces. This is one of them, a Mega Drive beat 'em up under the awkward name of Shui Hu Feng Yun Zhuan. Catchy isn't it?

When I saw this game I couldn't really care less for it, though it was made for an entirely different audience so that might be why. But don't ignore this post. My statistics say you like this weird crap so this might be right up your street, and after playing it, it gets to a few houses on my road too.

Fatman

Oh my god what am I doing with my life.

Remember a while back when I played Shaq Fu and claimed that it wasn't as bad as people made out? Well I think it's probably time to show you a fighting game that is truely terrible. That game is "Fatman", or to give it its localised and more disturbing title, "Tongue of the Fatman" (or in the US, "Slaughter Sport"). Hold on to your children.

Pipe Mania

If you've not played Pipe Mania before there's clearly something wrong with you. Perhaps you should do the world a favour and jump of a bridge - we don't need you in our society, you haven't connected bits of tubing together in an unconventional manner to redirect sludge.

My Pipe Mania, the one that I remember and love, is the DOS version. It's been released in numerous formats for numerous systems, sometimes under the title of "Pipe Dream", but the DOS copy is, as far as I'm concerned, the best. Most versions either underperform on the hardware, look or sound awful or screw up the formula, whereas the DOS game has none of those issues. It's great.

Orguss

You like the SG-1000 right? Come on, everyone likes the SG-1000. The SG-1000 is clearly the king of 1000-related SGs. Not convinced? Well observe this seemingly random SG-1000 game I've picked for you today.

Orguss. Based on an anime I have never watched (nor do I ever intend to watch for that matter). Except you wouldn't really know that unless you did your research, and for the benefit of this review and my anti-anime views, we'll assume that it's a standard space shooter with no ties to anything, like its spiritual sequel, TransBot.

X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse

This is not a joke.

In 1997 Zero Gravity Entertainment were given the rights to produce an X-Men first person shooter built off the Quake engine. The two franchises don't really mix but nevertheless here lies X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse for Windows and DOS based PCs.

It's a barrel of laughs, and I wouldn't have known about it if it weren't for Kotaku of all places.

Ms. Pac Man (Master System)

Don't know if you've ever played the Sega Mega Drive version of Ms. Pac-Man, but if you have, it doesn't take long to realise that the controls are broken. Despite having the wondrous power of the Mega Drive's 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor at their disposal, Tengen weren't able to make Ms. Pac-Man respond to d-pad presses, rendering the game unplayable.

But what of its Master System cousin? Was it any better?

SAGE 2010: Part 2

SAGE Harder

Some games have shown up fashionably late at the SAGE 2010. Time to have a look at them (and some of the ones I didn't look at before).

The Ninja

You don't hear much about ninjas anymore do you? Back in the 1980s, it was all the rage. Even more so if you put some reptiles into the mix.

The Ninja was one of the Master System's earliest of titles, and it shows. It gets into everything, being included in numerous compilations and re-released half a dozen times for the three people who want it. It's essentially the Sega System 1 arcade game "Sega Ninja" retooled significantly with added scrolling and removed females, and I bought it for a couple of quid a few years ago.