Summer Games Challenge 2023 - STARTS NOW!

[Key-Glyph]

I'm loving all this Sonic 3 talk.

I loved Blue Spheres stages so much as a kid I would connect other random Genesis games to Sonic & Knuckles to play extra maps of them. I still love them so much that I cleared them all in Sonic Mania. The achievement for that is by far the rarest one I've ever unlocked.

Another cool fact to add to all the others above is that Sonic 3 had assets that wouldn't be used until S&K came out, which provided fodder for some breathless gaming articles at the time. For example, if you repeatedly pause the game on the rotating sign that drops at the end of an Act, you can potentially pause on the Knuckles sign. I remember seeing a screenshot of this in a gaming magazine next to some juicy speculation. Was Knuckles going to be a playable character?!?! This was a huge deal!

Although now that I think about it, the only gaming magazine I ever had a subscription to was Sega Visions... so maybe they knew exactly what was going on and were just deliberately building hype.

Another thing I remember was my best friend coming over with Game Genie codes for Sonic 3 to get to the sound test/level select screen. He didn't have a Game Genie, and I didn't have all the gaming magazines he did, so this was a perfect convergence. When we did this, though, we saw levels listed by name that weren't in Sonic 3 -- and there was even music that wasn't in Sonic 3. It blew our minds. I remember not understanding how this was possible. Were we accessing the future?! I seriously think we stood up and jumped around the room while we speculated, barely able to control our enormous childhood emotions.

[MrPopo]

I'll be honest; I always preferred the S&K stages to the S3 stages. That said, I also didn't really play S3 until decades after I'd played the hell out of S&K, so that probably has something to do with it.

As for Castlevania 2, it's not just the obtuseness, it's the stuff around the obtuseness. All the enemies are surprisingly beefy, and because it's a sidescroller you can't really avoid them. Compare with Zelda 1, where "where do I go?" can be just as confusing but you are much more able to dodge stuff on the screen, so figuring out where to go isn't the chore that it is in CV2.

[alienjesus]

I've got another train commute coming up next Monday, and I'm saving the end of Castlevania 2 for that. So for the last couple of evenings I've been playing Sly Raccoon.

So far it's pretty decent -not perfect for sure, sometimes the controls seem a little unresponsive, and there's lots of ledges I keep getting caught underneath the edge due to weird level geometry, but it generally controls pretty well. The difficulty is on the easy side but I have still died quite a bit due to the game actually having pretty much a one hit death mechanic. You can get an item to take an extra hit, but they're not super common and can take a little while to reobtain after you lose one.

I was worried that the characters chatting would be annoying, but it's mostly OK so far. Your teammate Bentley is meant to be one of your best friends but honestly he's pretty unlikeable so far, but he doesnt talk quite as much as I was worried he might. Sly himself isn't particularly well characterised, he's very generic hero. There's some very contrived 'in-universe' reasons for the game to show markers and the likes which I found funny - they didn't need to try and explain away the game-y elements, but they tried anyway

So far so good with this one - 2 worlds down out of I think 5, so hoping I'll finish this one over the upcoming weekend.

[SpaceBooger]

Illusion of Gaia (SNES) 5/31/23
Wonderboy in Monster World (Genesis) 6/15/23
Final Fantasy Legend (GameBoy)
The Lost Vikings (Genesis)
Donkey Kong Country (SNES)
Metroid Prime (Wii Version)

WonderBoy in Monster World (GEN)
I beat the second game on my list this morning; I play every morning from 7-8/9am depending on my schedule. I really liked this game. It took a while to get used to the slow pace and short weapon, but after that initial adjustment all weren't well until the end. I have to admit I used a guide for the maze in the the Nightmare Castle and other than the disappearing platforms (spent 4 days on) and the final boss (two days) this game was about the perfect challenge level. Those two challenges at the time were crazy frustrating but after overcoming those challenges was crazy awesome. This game, especially those two parts, reminded me why I love retro games - practice, practice, more practice, then perfection.

[Key-Glyph]

1. Out of This World (GEN)
2. Journeyman Project: Turbo! (PC)
3. Theme Park (GEN)
4. Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town (GBA)
5. NHL Hockey '95 (GEN)
6. Lethal Enforcers (GEN)
7. Prince of Persia (Apple II)

Man, finishing Lethal Enforcers is so satisfying. This is a game I bought twelve years ago for very silly reasons during what I now think of as a magical time in my grown life. I'd eventually determined it impossible (or so I thought) to finish due to alignment issues on my CRT and stopped trying. But now I've seen it through, and it both brought a poetic kind of closure to a memory while also allowing me to relive it again. It was really great to remember what it felt like to be 26.

I went into the sentimental stuff last time, so let me tell you about the actual game. As my first light gun title since Duck Hunt, I don't know how much of Lethal Enforcers is standard gun gameplay stuff -- but this is the authority-focused story of you, a cop, helping clean up the 90s streets by shooting gang members and sparing civilians. I will tell you, it was weird to read the opening bit in the booklet because it felt so on-the-nose with the world we live in today:

You want to serve and protect, right? Well, I've heard it all before -- from the bleeding hearts who toss around the term "reform" like a platter of biscuits to the self-proclaimed vigilantes who think violence fights violence.

-- Lethal Enforces Genesis manual

This was originally an arcade game, and apparently it was a huge deal. I spent almost no time in arcades in the 90s outside of the occasional birthday party, so I don't remember coming across this cabinet -- but almost everyone else I talk to remembers it. If you saw a game with a blue and pink set of revolvers on it, that was this. My best friend said her local bowling alley had one and that it "looked like an actual action film, it was so realistic." I'm also going to bet it caused a ton of controversy at the time, because the sprites are digitized photos in the same way that Mortal Kombat's are -- so you're shooting """real people""" instead of cartoon representations of them.

You go through five acts with two or three stages each. I'm going to admit here that I'm pretty sure I've only ever watched one cop drama in my whole life -- the movie Infernal Affairs, which is the Hong Kong original that The Departed rehashed -- so I'm not sure why certain locales like Chinatown seem to pop up in this genre all the time. Banks, yes. Bank holdups are classic. Airports I can see. But I have to ask about the chemical plant level. Is this a thing that happens in a lot of police-focused action flicks?

The game is fun and satisfying, although I personally experience a lot of anxiety around the possibility of shooting civilians begging for help. I know that's the point, but it's a bit hard on me emotionally if I make a mistake. Gameplay-wise the game punishes you severely from any innocent victims by demoting your rank for each causality, then forcing you to replay the current level as many times as it takes to regain the appropriate rank. This is okay game logic, but it's weird to realize that the Lethal Enforcers police force solution to officers shooting civilians is... sending those officers out on more missions until they don't shoot civilians. Um.

My last thoughts are that I'm surprised by how sore my deltoids got from holding my Justifier out in front of me for hours, yet how impossible it was for me to give it a rest for a day to recover (I just fought through the pain). It was also really satisfying to shoot grenades lobbed at me in mid-air.

Oh, and I already loved this tune before I played the game, but please, put your eardums on this jam. The Genesis rendition is, in fact, my favorite.

[Ack]

Ooh, I have insights! And yes, I have played Lethal Enforcers in the arcade back in the day, because I thought it was awesome.

Chinatown - cop action movies grew in popularity and often employed action stars and stunt workers who also worked on the martial arts film genre, which was also growing in popularity in the 1980s (so much so, the era is known as the "ninja boom"). Factor in the film industry being in California, which houses large East Asian and Southeast Asian immigrant communities as well as what was both exoticism and paranoia about those communities and the countries they come from, and you get a recipe for action films in which a white supercop or martial arts expert saves the day. Bonus points if they can visit an exotic and "mysterious" locale actually in Asia.

See: Year of the Dragon, Black Rain, Showdown in Little Tokyo, Lethal Weapon 4, Rising Sun, The King of the Kickboxers, as well as such movies as Bloodsport, The Punisher (with Dolf Lundgren), The Perfect Weapon, Double Impact (bonus points for crossing over into the action-hero-faces-himself subgenre), The Last Dragon, and Big Trouble in Little China.

For chemical plants, it's an industrial setting that can be used for manufacturing drugs or weapons. Sometimes, such as in RoboCop, it's a location for a bad guy's hideout. The more rundown, the better.

[MrPopo]

You left off Beverly Hills Ninja in your list.

[Ack]

You left off Beverly Hills Ninja in your list.

Oh, I left off a ton: Beverly Hills Ninja, The Golden Child, Samurai Cop, the Rush Hour series, like half of the Cynthia Rothrock films...

Look, the important thing is that the only way Lethal Enforcers could be improved is if it incorporated more Gymkata.

[alienjesus]

1. Castlevania II: Simon's Quest (NES)
2. Terranigma (SNES)
3. Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader (GC)
4. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 (GC)
5. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back (PS1)
6. Jumping Flash! (PS1)
7. Dark Cloud (PS2)
8. Sly Raccoon (PS2)
9. Sakura Wars (Saturn)
10. Samba De Amigo (DC)

An unexpected triple update for me, with 3 games ticked off the summer list.

First up was Castlevania II, which it turns out I was only about 30-40 minutes from the end of. I admit I did use some helpful guides whilst playing the game, but I had a lot of fun anyway. The game definitely has some issues with how obscure it can be but I feel this is par for the course for adventure games of it's era, and it otherwise controls great and is a lot of fun to play. A map is the one resource I feel the game could use most as a lot of places look the same and more then once I thought I was backtracking but was actually covering new ground. I had a good time with this one, and found it far less frustrating in the latter parts than 1 and 3. Definitely a good one.

Second on my list was Sly Raccoon. I've been picking away at it during the week but I sat down with it a couple of times this weekend and powered through to the end. I really like the games aesthetic and the idea of stealth elements in a platformer is done really well. The characters are a bit bland so far but I can see what they're going for with them - maybe this improves in the sequel? The other issue I had is with the games 'theif skills' parkour system where pressing circle in the air causes you to snap to climbable objects, thin walkways and foothold, which was a bit finnicky sometimes - I died a lot on the games final boss because of it. Despite the flaws I think this a pretty good 3D platformer for the era. Not up there with greats like Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie, but certainly worth a look.

After finishing Sly Raccoon earlier today I had some time free so I got started on my next summer challenge title, Crash Bandicoot 2. I've previously played the first and the third game, so in theory it might have been interesting to see how the games progressed with this entry, but in all honesty, both the sequels are more of the same thing. Thats not a bad thing per se, as all 3 games are enjoyable enough platformers, but they definitely had a lot of things I'd have liked to see built upon or improved that never were. There's still some cheap level designs with hazards that will kill you the first time because they're not clearly signposted or visible, and the difficulty ratchets up fairly sharply around the two-thirds mark. Like both the other games in the series, this one is pretty short, with 25 levels to beat the game. I did stumble across a secret level whilst playing, with another 4 hidden levels to find by the looks of things, and there's lots of hidden items to find for completionists, but for me I was happy to just play through the game. I finished it in the same sitting I started the game in, although the last couple of levels I was ready to be done with the game.

Next up on the summer radar for me is Jumping Flash, to finish up the selection of Sony titles on my list. Seems like it's a pretty short one too, so shouldn't take too long to hit the halfway mark!

[Key-Glyph]

Thanks so much for all the context, Ack. I don't know why it never occurred to me that a chemical plant environment could be linked to drug manufacture. My immediate thought was the very 90s angle of, "...and they want to RUIN THE ENVIRONMENT, TOO??" The final straw!!

And yoooo, AJ, congrats on the hat trick -- and for finishing Castlevania II! Simon's Quest sounds like the Castlevania I'd be most likely to enjoy. I played the first one for a day as an adult (I hadn't tried it as a kid) and... did not have fun. I did the same with Bloodlines on Genesis and had a good time for a few levels, but never revisited it. Maybe I'll do Simon's Quest for a future Summer Games Challenge.

1. Out of This World (GEN)
2. Journeyman Project: Turbo! (PC)
3. Theme Park (GEN)
4. Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town (GBA)
5. NHL Hockey '95 (GEN)
6. Lethal Enforcers (GEN)
7. Prince of Persia (Apple II)

Today I started up The Journeyman Project: Turbo! and I am SO. EXCITED.

I brought out my old 2011 laptop for this. I already have a Windows 95 virtual machine installed there, and I also wanted the option of playing in the living room and tossing the game up on the TV for my partner Nathaniel to watch. I have a desktop these days, so using that would mean casting from the office. So, nah. Running an HDMI cable from couch to TV it is!

I used my own CD to install the game, which sadly is not my original. The disc that came packed-in with my family's first Windows computer was a casualty of our 2019 cross-country move. I actually remember tossing that disc into a garbage bag of miscellaneous non-recyclables and staring at it sitting in there, thinking to myself, "I think I'm making a mistake." I'd held onto that thing for decades, a frightening enigma I'd always wanted to revisit and understand -- this is like, Ecco the Dolphin-levels of fixated KeyGlyph obsession we're talking about here. But we didn't know how much space we were going to have when we moved, so I was determined to be ruthless as we scaled down our belongings.

Looking back on it, what difference was one CD going to make? But I was afraid to get sucked into that mindset of exceptions. It all worked out though. It only took me a year or two before I reclaimed a new copy, and now we're finally doing it. Today I sat down with some pizza and a soda and dove in.

If you're not familiar with it, this is a first-person point-and-click-ish game that's heavy on FMV clips and realistic rendered backgrounds. It's so of its time (1994) that you can sense how awed it anticipated you'd be of its unskippable cinematic sequences. It's happened a few times already that I've tried clicking interface buttons before realizing I was actually supposed to be chilling out with a transitional cutscene. It's so great. A totally different rhythm of play with its old-school expectations frozen in its amber.

To sum this up as briefly as possible, you are a temporal intelligence agent of the future tasked by the American government with guarding the world's first and only time machine, preventing its use and/or setting the timeline to rights in the event of spacetime catastrophe. On the same day that a now unified Earth is set to welcome the return of an alien civilization offering peaceful intergalactic alliance, changes are made in the past that drastically alter Earth's political priorities and stability. You avoid the temporal rip cascading through the timeline, suss out the major past events that were altered, and set off to restore them.

Maybe this sounds cheesy, but to baby Key it was THE COOLEST STUFF EVER, and the tone of the game is sufficiently foreboding and jarring to make it thrilling. I still think this, especially now that I'm a grown adult paying actual attention to things like inventory descriptions and foreshadowing. I am compelled.

As a kid I never solved any of the temporal changes. Tonight I already resolved one of them. I kind of lost my mind with excitement. It led to my discovering huge bits of plot I'd never known about, and I am just SO READY to see where this thing goes.

I also learned from reading the manual (which I don't believe I had back in the day, but I'm not totally sure) that there is more than one way to solve any given scenario. So, replay value?? Extra puzzles to work out?? I couldn't be happier. This is going to a very special Summer Games Challenge for me.