Retro Game of the Week: Duck Tales

Years ago, I was a great fan of the cartoon Duck Tales. I never really understood the point behind the show. Why ducks? I mean, couldn’t it have been just as good if it were anything? Monkeys, rhinos, parakeets, did it really fucking matter? In any case, the show follows the adventures of Uncle McScrooge, the richest duck in the world. For whatever reason he wants to constantly earn more money. In the show this means that McScrooge has to defend his hoard of money from villains or go on grand adventures to gather more money. The NES game that we’re looking at today is based upon these adventures.

The first thing that I’ll say about this game is that the music is excellent. The 8-bit rendition of the Duck Tales theme song couldn't be any better. Right away when the game starts up, you see one of the worst start screens ever. The whole thing is this terrible blue color with green, orange, and red splattered all over like some first graders rejected art project. The only option that you get to set with this screen anyway is difficulty.

Of course ducks can use supercomputers.

As soon as you choose how hard you want to get your ass spanked, you get dropped into a McScrooge’s base of operations with his fucking huge supercomputer. 

Getting your ass spanked...By a duck dominatrix no less.

Here you get to select one of five areas to search for treasure: The Amazon, Transylvania, African Mines, The Himalayas, and The Moon. The levels are all fairly detailed and the graphics in the game are very impressive for the time. Take McScrooge for instance, he’s well done and looks just like he does in the cartoon. His attack is ridiculous. The fucking duck jumps around on his cane like a damn pogo stick or whacks things with it like a damn golf club, and that’s it. You do that to kill Gorillas, break rocks, and open chests that contain treasure. The levels are structured in that you run around and collect all of the “small treasure” that adds slight amounts to your dollar total, running in the upper left hand corner of the screen, but the ultimate goal is to find the “big” treasure at the end of the level and kill the boss. Once that happens, you chat with some crazy pelican pilot and he flies your ass back to Duckburg to do it all over again in the next area.

Ducks.

Each level proceeds in the same manner, but the layouts are different. This is a great platformer game, and it plays very well. My main problem with it is that it’s just fucking weird. That really just goes back to the original idea behind the cartoons. Why the fuck is it ducks?

So let’s jump ahead to the final level, or at least the one that most people save for last, The Moon.  Here you’re a duck in space pogo jumping on aliens.  I don’t fucking get it.  Why are you looking for treasure in space?  This isn’t Uncharted, its god damn Duck Tales.

Wow, space.  Just great.

 So at the end of the game you have to go back to Dracula Duck Manor and beat the vampire duck.  After that you end up in a race to the top of a rope and you get your treasure.  The final screen of the game is McScrooge having some kind of fucking seizure on top of all of his money wearing a crown.  What this game all comes down to to me is what frontiers the NES was able to explore with popular titles.  Where else would you find a Duck Tales video game where they travel to space and fight vampire ducks?  Though this game is completely fucked up, it really shows the power of video games to explore and exploit cultural phenomenons as well as stretch the limits of imagination and creativity.  Even with my frustration with the fucking ducks, I have to admit that without this game there's no way that I could play games like Fallout New Vegas on a regular basis.

Day 20: Sandbox

What kind of turtle eats sand?

Remember when you were a little kid and you dreamed up everything that you could possibly imagine and put those dreams down into sand?  I recall that I created massive cities with Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars.  I carefully crafted each and every building with loving hands and sculpted until my fingers ached.  Once I had created the most excellent city that my young mind could think of, I parked all of the cars as if citizens were living out their days in a city of sand.  Then I would build a volcano. At the center of that volcano was a hose.  Once the hose switched on, I was the master of that tiny city, I alone controlled its fate.  I sprayed and sprayed until the entire city and it's inhabitants were washed away in the flood or the ensuing mudslides.  Sadistic, right?  But, left to your own devices, didn't you do much of the same?  These types of experiences now translate to what the industry calls Sandbox games.

Sandboxy goodness.

The recent Grand Theft Auto games are a perfect and shining example of the Sandbox genre, one of the first that I played too.  This game doesn't go so far as to city destruction, but it does provide us with a context.  As the character you are free to do whatever quests you want, just fuck around with the rest of the city, or complete all of the side-quests.  Me, I complete the main quests first.  As I do, I unlock other parts of the city or various weapons that I didn't have in the first place.  After I get to a certain point, where I think I can hold my own against the rest of the city, I run around and just fucking unload in the most populated area I can find and fight until I die.  The other fun thing that I like to do is find the highest point and take a sniper rifle to town.  Now of course one couldn't do this without a complete separation of fantasy and reality.  Obviously I have no intentions of doing this in real life.

Assassins are great fun at parties like this one.

Another sandbox game that I rather enjoy is Assassin's Creed.  Though it's much more structured than your GTA, it's still got that sandbox feel of running all around the city.  And it's different in that you run ALL AROUND the city.  You flip, jump, wall run, and acrobat your way around the entire place.  It's sandbox in it's freedom of movement.  Sure there are quests to do, but there are challenges of movement that help you out as well.  Another game that had similar movement controls, and was also mission based is Prototype.  In that game you control a genetically-enhanced human that needs to save the world.  The controls are similar to Assassin's Creed, but the missions differ and there's a bit more sandboxyness.  Yeah, I know it's not a word, but I hold creative control over this blog...so there.

To date I haven't seen a console game that really rivals my all-time favorite of Black and White for being a sandbox game.  You are literally a god that controls, helps, and terrorizes an entire world.  You have a creature that can carry out your designs or you can directly help or hinder your villagers.  I loved this game when it first came out, but it had some issues.  Number one, it was pretty much broken.  I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out most of the shit that I had to do.  Number two, it was hard to play.  The controls just didn't feel right for the game itself.  For now, I need to continue my search for the perfect sandbox game.  My question for you is, how do you play your sandbox games?  Do you just fuck around with everything or do you quest until you can't quest any further?  As for me, I think I might go back to my cars and hose.

Day 19: Genres

 

 

 

This is a game.

What do you think of when you think of a video game?  Something like the above, right?  Well that's a platformer, only one of several types of popular genres out there in mainstream gaming.  It's one of the most classic types out there.  Nothing says video game like controlling a sprite that hops, skips, and jumps their way to victory.  But what about the other types of games?  Sure, Mario is great fun for those people who are satisfied with a simple beat the level and get the highest score scenario.  Yes, there's usually a plot to a platform game but does it really matter in the end?  If you want a game that tells a story, look for a Role-Playing Game.

My favorite RPG of all time.

 This is definitely my favorite game type of all time.  The RPG has every element that I want and need in a game.  Those aspects are a complex story, strategy, and obviously a large role-playing piece.  At their core, these types of games pit the player and their party in turn-based battles of might, magic, and skill against monsters, humans, and what have you while questing to save the world.  Along the way the party increases in skill, levels up as it's called, and gathers a variety of skills and equipment to help assure victory.  One intangible, but undeniably essential, part of an RPG is the great joy one finds in completing side quests and finding rare items.  For instance, in Chrono Trigger the story circles around the ability to time travel and the effects that the characters have on the space-time continuum.  Each character has a specific time and place that will trigger quests and each quest that you complete affects the ending of the game.  Not to mention that each side quest ends up giving you extra, fantastic items and that there's a feature that activates at the end of the game called New Game + that allows you to restart the game with everything that you gained throughout the course of playing.  Another genre that has some of these similar elements yet combines them with parts of a platforming game is Adventure.

Stop looking at her breasts.

Tomb Raider is an excellent example of an Adventure game.  Not only are you getting the story aspect of the RPG genre, but you're seeing a lot of the platformer's aspects in action.  Lara Croft runs, jumps, and shoots her way through tons of different areas, all in an effort to gather some artifact to save the world or something.  The picture on the left looks like she's dunking a basketball or diving to tackle someone.  Of course, this is my heavy-handed segway into Sports games, but you knew that already.

This is actually very entertaining.

Sports games come in a variety of flavors, football, soccer, hockey, basketball, and every other sport you can think of down to horse racing.  Now of course the idea behind these games is pretty simple, you take control of a team and play against other teams to see who wins.  As time has gone on, however, the games have evolved to include things like drafts, franchise mode, and career mode.  These various additions make it feel a lot more like a real life sport that you're watching and controlling at the same time.  Now for those of us that are up to date on our motion gaming, we all know that sports games using a controller are starting to fade away and we're seeing something more like this on the right where you are the player and you are actually moving in line with what you need to accomplish. 

Ugh, even the graphics are ass.

All of what I've gone over are some of the essential building blocks of more complex and exciting game types.  Companies have certainly mixed and matched to both gamers' delight and agony.  There are a few genres out there though that need to be approached with caution because more often than not, you're going to end up playing a piece of shit.  Point and click games are just wrong.  You go screen to screen trying to accomplish an objective like escaping an island, but you don't really do anything video game-like.  You move a cursor around the fucking screen and click on shit until you advance to the next screen, and so on and so on.  Of course the games are a bit more complex as you need to move from location to location and back and forth and back and forth; it gets so horrible that by the end of the game you want to vomit like you just read the worst run-on sentence in your entire life.  Now combine that with an Educational game and you're just asking for it.  A great example of an educational game is Mario Piano.  Who the fuck wants to play the piano with Mario?  Yeah, that's what kids want, they want to learn to play the piano with Mario.  Kids play video games to have fun not to learn.  What game company sat around their gigantic executive board room table and had their execs agree that making an educational game, in this day and age, is a good idea?  I'd really like to know, because they have got to be the dumbest shits in existence.  The only way that I can imagine that they are still afloat is that their CEO has the ability to crap out a golden egg every 15 minutes.  That's the only way I can see them still standing amongst the good gaming companies out there; every 15 minutes, two pounds of gold.  That's a realistic situation.

Day 18: Pwning

Looking back on the internet gaming sensations of the past few years, one thing always stands out, or rather over, everything else when it comes to similar aspects of playing the games involved.  One person is always better than another and that person is most likely going to be an arrogant asshole because of it.  I myself end up in that type of situation often while playing Halo, but most of the time I attempt to curb my arrogance and just move on with the game.  However, there are those players who, from time to time, will "assert their dominance" as it were by using the above maneuver.  Let's get a bit of history on this phenomenon before we just jump in though.

This could be a normal person.

Counter Strike is definitely one of the greatest and most memorable internet shooters of all time, there's no doubt about it, but it started a literary trend that has been guided into the language of every gamer to ever play an online shooter.  To a normal person, owning something is to have ownership or to have something be your property, but to a gamer owning has become something much more.  For instance, in Counter Strike, if you kill someone without even having to try or with an extreme amount of skill, you may "own" the person because you're able to assert your dominance with your abilities.  Whomever first coined the word own to be used in this manner for online gaming started a flash fire in the vocabularies of players everywhere.  Now instead of saying, "Oh damn that guy killed the shit out of me," we now say, "Oh damn that guy owned my ass!"  Notice the differences.

This is only one step too far.

Moving along the timeline that I'm imagining, it's not hard to see how an infectious use of the word own could be misspelled at some point close to it's origin.  Considering that everyone and their mother makes a million spelling errors every second, someone at some point hit the p key rather than the o key and the world ended up with "pwn."  Now clearly not everyone uses pwn, there's still a large segment of the internet population that uses the original own, but the pwn population ended up migrating off the beaten path of insults and took things a few steps too far.  Take a look at the image on the right.  How many of us remember My Little Pony?  Well, this is what happens when the internet and the pwners get a hold of decency and cartoons.

This is demoralization.

Remember the image at the beginning?  The Teabagging gaming community, members of which run over to a downed corpse and crouch repeatedly to mimic the sexual act of teabagging though for an aspect of humiliation rather than of the actual act, at some point along the timeline merged with the pwners.  What you have now is a mutation of not only the original word own, but also of the acts that they entail.  This is also partially caused by the lack of both speech and type capabilities when playing the newer games that include the option to not listen to everyone's inane bullshit chatter about what they did last night.  Now when a victim is downed in Halo, they are owned by the killer's abilities and then teabagged, thus resulting in a pwn.  It's been scientifically proven that the only way to stop someone from pwning is to pwn them yourself. So join with me and declare war on pwners.

Let's all be bigger people.

In war, demoralization is just as important as inflicting actual casualties, perhaps even more important.  So here's my proposition to stop the pwners that pwn just for the fun and humiliation: pwn only the people who pwn you first.  Pwn them so hard that they won't ever want to pwn again.  Of course there's always the sane option of just killing them and moving on without the added humiliation, and thus being the bigger person, but I doubt that many gamers can be convinced to do that.

Day 17: Conan the Barbarian

I cannot think of a more exemplary example of the classic Barbarian character, or class for us Dungeons and Dragons addicts, than Conan.  He is epic.  The legend began with some short stories, then moved to comics, onto video games, and eventually became immortalized in the 1980s film.  For those of you that haven't been to the movies in months, you most likely didn't know that a new film recently hit theaters in the states.  As a fairly avid movie-goer I noticed the previews immediately as they hit the big screen, and they were amazing.  I thought that it couldn't get any better than Conan in 2011.  Well, I was wrong.  Horribly, horribly wrong.

The start of the movie gave a long and boring story.  Sure, I need some backstory to involve myself in any fantasy movie, but I don't think that I've sat through quite that much bullshit in a long while.  My only solace for the first ten minutes or so was Morgan Freeman's soothing voice.  Unfortunately that peace is quickly taken away by a sword jabbing into the belly of Conan's mother.  I want to point out here that I have no problem with action, violence, and gore so these scenes don't really affect me in that way, they just suck like there's no tomorrow.  Right, back to the birth.  Conan's father rushes over and cuts the baby out and he receives his namesake before his mommy dies, fantastic.  For whatever reason, the transition through to the next stage of life for the young hero is preceded by his father pulling a Lion King in the middle of a brutal battle without so much as looking around to check for enemies.  Yeah, right, and no one would rush up to kill the moron staring into the sky holding up the most fake baby ever.

So Conan rushes through life to somewhere around 10 or 12, pre-teen, whatever.  To be a warrior you have to run around a hill without breaking an egg or some shit, I really couldn't pay much attention since the loss of any action at all.  After some agonizing scenes of kids running, Conan gets attacked by some crazy, growling natives...I think.  He ends up killing all four or five and taking the heads back without his egg being broken.  Pretty cool I have to admit, but I'm not impressed.  I want to see the grown-up Barbarian legend, not some weird little boy with homicidal tendencies!  So whatever, you sit through another half hour of Conan making a sword, some crazy guy with a bone mask who wants to be a god, and the death of the father.  Skipping ahead 20 years Conan is some Fabio lookalike reject killing slavers with an African-American pirate or something, which just makes me think of Sinbad in more ways than one.  After freeing about a million slaves in two different areas, we realize that Conan is consumed by revenge for his father's death.

This is an example of a Shadow Lord.

The man who killed him is now some Shadow Lord or something and Conan essentially goes through all of the man's five generals while protecting some innocent, "pure" woman from being abducted to wake up some necromancer.  The story really doesn't matter here, it's well put together but it's executed very poorly so it's easy to lose interest and just beg for Conan to fight some more.  Long story short, the woman gets abducted by mask guy who plans to cut her up and become a god.  Conan shows up at the last minute and a battle ensues that lasts for waaaay too long.  Conan wins and takes the lady home and wanders off for more hijinks.


I was so sorely disappointed in the movie that I didn't even want to finish my popcorn, and that is unheard of.  So in any case what I found is that this film was too difficult to care about.  We were never in one place long enough to really learn about what's going on.  I thought I was just being dumb about how this movie progressed until I had a revelation today that explains the whole thing.  It's all really just a big Mardi Gras party.  Yeah, get this there were like 7000 topless women, flashy outfits all over, violence, alcohol, and this giant boat/float thing.  It was exactly like the Mardi Gras celebration, no different whatsoever.  You don't even remember anything happened afterwards they're so similar.  I feel like I went to New Orleans rather than a movie theater.  Well, at least that's one thing I can check off of my to-do list.