The SNES was great for racing games. You had Super Mario Kart, F-Zero, the Top Gear games, and this quirky, super-polygon-filled title called Stunt Race FX.

All the cars in this game have eyeballs. So it’s kind of like The Brave Little Toaster or something. Which, by the way, is a movie that I hold solely responsible for how absolutely terrible I felt when my first car fell by the wayside and had to be towed away. Rest in pieces, dear 1990 Chrysler LeBaron!

(The guy in the TV cracks me up though.)

Now Stunt Race FX is one of those games that never got as much attention as it probably deserved. Sure, it didn’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, but when it retread old ground, it did so very solidly. The controls were tight and the tracks were fun. And the 3D was a big deal back then. I mean, I could be wrong, but I remember just this game and Starfox as being the only games of this kind on SNES.

The music was pretty good too. I found a Stunt Race FX remix on OCRemix this one time and I was like “OH EM GEE” because I had almost forgotten about this game. It sort of made my day.

You gotta admit, this 3D is pretty good for being on a freaking SNES.

Anyways, the point is that Stunt Race FX is a pretty unknown game, and that’s really too bad. Sure, it’s not gonna be on any “SNES Top Ten” lists anytime soon, but that’s more of a side effect of the SNES being the best gaming platform EVER than anything else.

And c’mon. Cars with eyeballs. Never gets old. (Just ask Pixar!)

There were FPS games, and there were platforming games, and then there was Jet Force Gemini for Nintendo64, which decided to try to be both of them at once and somehow managed to pull it off.

This was a sci-fi game that had you visiting various (themed, of course) planets, blasting bugs with plasma guns and saving little fuzzy Ewok-like creatures. You could play one of three characters– of which the best was a cybernetically-enhanced dog with a machine gun on his back (because come on, that’s just awesome). The characters have a sort of cute, doll-like appearance, which is promptly tainted by all the guns and blood and flying alien parts after you’d blasted them to kingdom come. Sounds fun, no? It was.

The FPS/Platformer hybrid aspect of the game was accomplished by having you see and control your character platformer-style most of the time, and then when you pulled out your gun and targeted something the camera would zoom in on your character’s head, which would become translucent, allowing you to slip seamlessly into “FPS mode”. It took a bit of getting used to at first, but once you did you’d wonder why you ever had problems with it.

Another of the game’s big triumphs was the inclusion of multiplayer co-op. See, partway through the game’s story a little flying robot with lasers started following you around. His name was Floyd (the Droid. Eh? Eh?). He would default to being controlled by the computer AI but at any time someone could press Start on the second controller and take manual control of Floyd. Floyd didn’t have the same versatility as the actual playable characters and playing Floyd was basically playing a shooting game on a track, but boy was it ever helpful to have someone play Floyd for you when you were on a difficult boss fight.

I played this game a lot when I was younger. But I never beat it. Why? Because it was a Rare game that ultimately fell prey to the DK64 Collectathon Syndrome, but in the most horrible possible way. See, up until about, oh, two-thirds of the way through the game, saving all the Ewoks was a good idea, but ultimately optional. Which was fortunate because they were a gigantic pain to collect. It was much more fun to just focus on bug-blasting your way to the end of the level.

So anyway two-thirds of the way through the game an NPC informs you that in order to pass you need to go back to the beginning and go through every level, again, and save every single Ewok.

Yeah, um, guess who stopped playing the game?

Bad Rare! Bad! No cookie!

Still, other than that little slipup, I look back on this game with nothing but memories of awesome. Why this hasn’t been given a sequel or the remake treatment yet is beyond me. Cause I’d be first in line.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, I got a game called Warcraft III. I was super excited to play it because I was expecting something very akin to my beloved StarCraft but with better graphics.

…unfortunately, it failed to live up to my expectations. Not saying it was a bad RTS, but, well, when you’ve been spoiled by StarCraft there is very little that WILL live up to your RTS expectations. The lore didn’t exactly grab me at the time either (don’t shoot me, THAT WAS THEN AND THIS IS NOW), so Warcraft III and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, went by the wayside for a bit.

Enter DotA– Defense of the Ancients– a Use-Map-Settings game that does away with the RTS style of the original WCIII completely and replaces it with this really interesting game involving Hero Units and armies trying to advance to the other side of the map. And holy cogs, it was fun.

My favorite character? Netherdrake. I think they called him “Viper” or something, but he was a netherdrake, and I loved him. I messed around with a few other characters as well, but You Can’t Stop the Netherdrake.

The gameplay had lots of deep little nuances to the point that the DotA forums were rife with theorycrafting the likes of which my virgin eyes had rarely seen before– there were dozens and dozens of items and upgrades, all with their pros and cons. And a chicken delivered them to you, by the way, which was awesome. I, for my part, ignored the theorycrafting and figured out what worked best for me and I don’t think I was too bad, either.

I played it online multiplayer a few times but the DotA community always had this weird sort of “ONLY SUPER PRO PLAYERS ALLOWED” attitude and so I, not wanting to burden any unsuspecting team with my nub-ness, stuck largely to a map that let me play against the computer. No worries, it was just as fun. Ultimately, that’s what I want in my games, you know?

DotA of course gained considerably notoriety with the release of the Basshunter song “Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA”, which, if I understand correctly, is Swedish for “We’re sitting here in Ventrilo playing DotA”. It’s what the entire song is about, and as everyone knows, the chicks dig Ventrilo at their LAN parties:

Have I mentioned that I have a thing for Swedish guys? No? Have you seen their curling team? …what? You know what, brb, I’m moving to Sweden. (As an aside, practically every male friend I have flies into a murderous rage upon hearing that I think Basshunter is eye candy, and I’m still not sure why.)

ANYWAYS, I haven’t played DotA in a while. I think it had to do with a combination of issues getting Warcraft 3 to play nice with Linux and simply moving on to other games, such as one that starts with a “W” and ends with a “orld of Warcraft”. Still, I look back fondly on that little game. You were one fun trip, DotA, and hats off to the gaming community that imagined you up.

At first I was sort of undecided regarding my intentions to make a Classic Video Game Monday post today. See, as a general rule I don’t post on the weekends (at least not very often), and for a lot of us American-types, today is still technically “the weekend”, being Memorial Day and all. However, I didn’t want to let a Monday go by without a CVGM post, and so here I present a rather light-hearted one: an entire genre of the wonderful thing known as TOWER DEFENSE.

I was first introduced to this genre with Use-Map-Settings games in StarCraft, a game that I played religiously for several years.

“UMS” games were games where instead of playing a straightforward StarCraft match, you would play different sorts of games that had been specifically set up for you. There were a couple different styles that were perennially popular, such as “Golem Madness”, which involved combining units into hero units, and there were also various tower defense games. “Team Matrix D” was the biggie back then, if I recall correctly, and I was pretty immediately addicted to it. It involved waves of enemies coming for you– each wave getting stronger– and you had to build various defenses and patrolling units to keep them at bay. It was amazingly fun and unbelievably addictive.

So zip forward a couple of years and you’ve got Tower Defense games cropping up, Flash-style, across the Internet, so you can build and destroy to your heart’s content. Desktop Tower Defense has always been my favorite:

The depth here for strategy is endless. Endless, just like the kicking I do to myself if I let so much as a single mob pass through. Yeah I’m a perfectionist.

Desktop Tower Defense isn’t the only one that’s out there, though. And when I come across a Tower Defense game somewhere, I am always immediately gripped by an uncontrollable urge to drop everything and master said game.

The saddest part about Tower Defense is that you’re really not sure who to give thanks to for inventing the genre. I suppose you could say it had its roots in “Rampart“, but even that isn’t telling the full story. Wikipedia says “Early tower defense games appeared post-2000 in maps for StarCraft, Age of Empires II, and WarCraft III.” You know what that means? That means that this awesome genre was pretty much invented by the community. By your everyday RTS player who wanted to have some fun. Whoever you are out there, you are a genius and you rock. Same with whoever invented DotA, but that’s another story.

…but Obligatory DotA Song Insert is Obligatory.

…I now know what next week’s CVGM will be. Eeeeexcellent. *arches fingers*

Happy Memorial Day everyone!

I’m not exactly huge on shooters. I just never really got into the genre, as a whole. There were two big exceptions, though– two shooters that I played the heck out of. One of them was Halo. But the first– the original– was Goldeneye 007.

I know most of you remember this one. The graphics were bulky and blocky– hilariously so, to look back on it now:

But did that matter at the time? No, because this game was amazing and addictive.

The gameplay was solid and each level gave you a variety of difficulty options. The weapons were all unique and interesting. And most importantly, you could spend hours messing around with the stupidest things and it was still fun. I have memories of playing this game with friends or family members for hours doing stunt games like “PROXIMITY MINES ONLY”. You’ve gotta be a good game to pull something like that off. I mean sure, we’d do stuff like Pistols Only or whatever on Halo, but c’mon, Proximity Mines? It was just so epic.

You also got a watch with a laser on it, which you actually had to use at one point. Although you could shoot people with it if you wanted.

Now let’s talk about the levels. Facility is basically the greatest level ever. I’m not really sure what about it was so appealing. Maybe it was because you started out in a bathroom, or maybe it was just because of the sheer variety of the place’s scope. Maybe it’s because on single-player, it masterfully presented you with goals that were interesting but still achievable in order to ease you into the game, while on multiplayer it was just madcap fun. Whatever the reason, I really can’t think of a more memorable FPS level, at least on consoles.

Granted, the game was full of amazing levels (Bunker comes to mind), and not just multiplayer-wise. The single-player campaigns were rock-solid as well, full of challenges and plenty of humor (like the Bond girl admonishing you to be quiet as you attempt to fend of soldiers who want to kill you.)

So, Goldeneye 007. Anytime someone tells you that no movie has ever been made into a good video game, you can remind them that there is at least one that has.

In closing, imagine how silly you must look when you press pause.

Back about five years ago or so, I would have to sit down and explain to people in detail about why a game about farming was so fun and addictive. These days it’s much easier because everyone’s played Farm Town or whatever it’s called.

Seriously though, who would’ve thought that tilling soil, planting crops, harvesting and selling said crops, and trying to get the cute librarian girl to fall in love with you would be fun? It is, though.

I played two different versions of this game, one for the original Game Boy (basically a port of the one for SNES), and one for Game Boy Advance called “Friends of Mineral Town”. Both were essentially the same, except the GBA version had better graphics/sound and removed some hilarious Engrish like “Confirm the origin of fire!” if you approached your stove.

Harvest Moon’s trick is to suck you in by enticing you with more and more goals. First you just want to get your crops planted. Then you want to sell the crops so you can get money for cows and chickens and stuff. Then you start exploring the village and you find out there’s this whole dating sim game going on with about six different girls. Getting one to like you is an excruciatingly long and painstaking process that involves memorizing where she is on certain days and bringing her specific flowers and gifts that she likes, and doing this for months. And months. And months. You put up with it, though, because it’s such a challenge. And because some other guy is always trying to barge in.

Supposedly you can eventually get to a point where the girl likes you enough that she’ll marry you and then one day you’ll randomly wake up with a kid; I never got that far myself, though. The closest I got was spending about a year in game getting Cute Librarian Girl’s affection for me to go up by approximately half a point. On the plus side, if you fail at all that, you can always watch your cows have babies instead. (The mystery of what exactly is in the “Cow Miracle Potion” is never explained, but that’s probably for the best.)

Ooh! I almost forgot another thing you could do in this game. Expand/build your house. That was one of those things that I never really got into because the girls were too distracting.

Oh, Harvest Moon. It’s been a while, but one of these days I’m sure I’ll get the urge and jump back in.