Xbox Live Arcade Guide: Classic Arcade Games Galore!

Hey, here's something to remind you that the frigid specter of Death is always just behind your shoulder and closing rapidly - the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade game is 18 years old this year! With it's fabled presence in some 98% of America's arcades at the height of it's popularity, odds are that old-school gamers have some memories of it from some time or another ... but we're quite a stretch down the road now, those machines aren't so easy to come across anymore, and we got a whole new generation of snot-nosed Playstation-raised gamers who grew up in a gaming scene where arcades have become little more than expensive repositories for overpriced racing games, and lifelike simulations of shooting terrorists or drug dealers or whatever boogeyman we're all supposed to be afraid of at the moment.

So I guess it's nice that TMNT has been released for the X-Box Live Arcade, for the sake of preservation and whatnot.Those of us with a penchant for emulation have been enjoying online Turtles multiplay for a few years now courtesy of MAME32k (http://www.kaillera.com/download.php), but there is of course the small question of legality and intellectual property rights and suchforth. (Needless to say, I personally own a Turtles arcade machine. Which I keep .... in my
bathroom. No, you can't come in and see it.)

Anyway, the game. TMNT is big, dumb, colorful fun. It was absolutely the toast of the town when it hit in '89 - we'd seen beat 'em ups before, heard digital voice clips, even had a few four player cabinets, but TMNT took all the outstanding single qualities of the best arcade games to that point, improved on them, and made them it's own. We had literally not seen so much stuff going on at once, and then you factor in that the original Turtles cartoon was at the peak of it's popularity at this time and you can maybe start to see how a bunch of pre-pubescent kids got into such an uproar about it that they threw every spare quarter they had at the thing.

How has it aged? Well, the "wow" factor is certainly gone. Randomly distributed objects laying in the midst of the playfield that you can hit to knock over enemies isn't quite regarded with the same innovative awe as it was nearly two decades ago. And in a world of CGI and voice-acting, a few static cartoon cutscenes and the occasional muffled digital declaration of "Hang on April!" or "Tonight I dine on turtle soup!" clearly doesn't carry the same weight. However, that doesn't mean the game is not pleasant. It's got a level of detail that's still appreciable - even though you're fighting essentialy a horde of pallette-swapped clones level after level, they come bounding and somersaulting and wheelie'n onto the screen, they use a variety of moves with a nice amount of animated frames, you can knock sewer grates back at them and slam them into the sides of buildings, etc. Despite it's lack of enemy variety the game is never really boring. The gameplay is smooth, the collision detection solid. The graphics are clear, colorful and there's a lot going on in the backgrounds (simply animated though it all may be). Oh, and it's got a rad soundtrack.

It doesn't stand up very well, however, to single play. This is a game that really does much better when you have at least one companion to chat with while you play, and preferably a full load of four. In the original arcade scene, it was a very social game. You would make friends with strangers while playing this game. Nowadays, it's best experienced as a nostalgia fest with some good companions from back in the day.

Worth $10, when you can MAME it at no charge? Hey, it's your call, and your money. It'll probably be a lot easier to find remote partners to play with when you're in the mood, and you don't have to goof around with MAME controller settings to get everyone set up with the turtle that they want to be. It'll provide more long term entertainment than a trip to the cinema to see the latest attempt by some music video director to exploit nostalgia by "remaking" an '80s classic, and all-in-all probably costs a bit less too.

YOUR OTHER OPTIONS : MAME; TMNT 2 for NES (a pretty horrible port); TMNT 2 : Battle Nexus (for Gamecube, PS2 and PC) which has this game as an unlockable reward

Castlevania : Symphony of the Night
Published by : Konami
Original Release : Sony Playstation, 1997

Your modern Large Game Publisher can employ one of two basic philosophies when setting out to create a new game. The first is to allot the necessary resources and time to do the best they can with their material, and to craft an experience that they believe the player will thoroughly enjoy and count on sales through good reviews and positive word of mouth. The other philosophy is to maximize profit by skimping wherever possible, and then basically con or manipulate you into buying the game somehow. This latter approach is particularly easy to take when trading on the good name of a series that has established credibility through multiple quality releases - Castlevania would be a perfect example. Thankfully, Konami has never taken the latter approach with this franchise (yes, I'm including the 3D games in that statement - bad as they were, I believe that they were really trying). Symphony of the Night is instead one of the greatest examples of the former philosophy - loads of detail, lots of stuff that could have easily been cut from the game without affecting it's overall positive reviews, a very moody gothic sort of atmosphere created by the exemplary craftwork in all areas and the sense that the design team really, really loved what they were doing and generally wanted to live up to the expectations of the fans of their work and then go one better. I don't know if it qualifies as art, but it's a beautiful game.

SotN has the sort of stylistic and gameplay direction that began with the Bloodlines game for Genesis and continued with the rare and coveted wilderbeest Dracula X for the NEC TurboDuo. Varied backgrounds that go beyond the usual dark forest / castle dungeon motif, much more robust heroes possessing a greater range of abilities than those seen in the NES origins, the wonderfully diverse music of Michiru Yamane...then it boosts it all into the upper pantheon of gaming by pilfering the non-linear free-exploration style of Super Metroid and a sort of RPG-like statistics and inventory system similar to the Ys games or Zelda 2 (but vastly better than either of those examples). It also helps that it has a really badass main character. And, as mentioned before, there's just a slew of wonderful little details - multiple types of weapons to use, combos and hidden moves based on what you have equipped, spells invoked via Street Fighter style motions, hidden items and areas (it's very possible for a player not using a walkthrough and not asking for any help to completely and totally miss a full 50% of the game and never know), unique idle and death animations for nearly all of the game's common enemies .... it's almost impossible to catch everything on your first play-through,and then once you've completed the game you've got a few extra modes to replay in (including one that lets you play as an entirely different character).

Is it worth ten dollars to download? Well, even if it isn't perfectly emulated, it's incredible just to have this game available again in any form - after a limited Greatest Hits reprint in the late 1990s due to massive demand, the only option in the past five years or so has been to go troll eBay for a used copy that will run you $30-40 at best. So, at least sheerly for the sake of preservation and availability, sure. It's absolutely worth it.

YOUR OTHER OPTIONS : a used copy of the original Playstation version .... that's about it.

Alien Hominid
Published by : ZOO Digital Publishing
Original Release : Multiple platforms, 2004

Alien Hominid is an interesting story. It first appeared as a Flash game at the website Newgrounds, where it was extremely popular. So the game's designer got together with a couple of buddies, reworked the whole thing into a full-length game, and got a publishing deal through UK-based ZOO Digital Publishing to get it ported to nearly every major gaming platform of the time.

It's basically Metal Slug, with scribbly graphics. If you haven't played that one, it's a side-scrolling run-and-gun sort of game wherein a horde of imaginative and
well-animated troops are constantly pouring in to attack you, and the levels are usually punctuated with massive graphically impressive boss fights. So Hominid is basically that, except you play as an alien who has crash-landed on Earth and you're fighting your way through hordes of hostile Earthlings to accomplish some ill-explained objective. I think it's sort of like the Pixies song "Motorway to Roswell", except instead of ending up in Army crates the alien is blasting the shit out of everyone to find a replacement ship at Area 51 and go home.

Much has been made of the game's art style ... visit typical gaming mags and look at their reviews and you'll see phrases like "inspired vision" being thrown
around ... looks more to me like "working within personal and budgetary constraints", but hey. Basically it's that poorly drawn cartoon style which is commonly found in Flash videos at Newgrounds featuring Mario dismembering Michael Jackson with a chainsaw or whatever, but in the mainstream gaming world it is a unique look and it's pulled off pretty well here with fluid animation. The only major gripe with the art is that it's sometimes hard to tell when you're overlapping with an enemy, and to compound things most of them can be walked through *except* when they're in some particular frame of attack animation, which gives the whole thing a slightly sloppy feel at times.

The game is on the short side - it's broken up into three sets of five levels, each of which takes between 5-10 minutes to clear. Each set has a particular themed group of enemies - first you're slaughtering FBI agents, then in the second set you attack Soviet Russia for some reason, then finally Area 51 and it's elite military guards. Overall the game is pretty difficult, but that's mitigated by giving you a lot of lives and saving your progress after every level. Some parts are just flat-out cheap, such as when you're ground between two tanks with bullets flying around everywhere and little room to move. And there's a couple of spaceship levels in there, which are kind of hard to control and generally pretty boring, particularly the second one where you just toodle around aimlessly killing the same enemies over and over with no real sense of purpose or progress. You run into a similar situation in level 3-1 where you do little the entire level but jump the same repetitive scorpion enemies and fight the same gimpy vulture mini-bosses over and over and over again. There's some mini-games to unlock, but on the whole they're not that much fun, exception of some of the PDA levels which play a bit like a small scale Prince of Persia.

All-in-all, I have a very Meh sort of feeling about this game. At first it's fun and even somewhat impressive, but then you realize it's basically just Metal Slug except more limited, and there's not really a whole lot of replay value. Run-and-gun fans may enjoy it, but if you can't stand games where you die in one hit it will probably drive you nuts. On one hand it's great to see an indy game be promoted and succesful on this scale, but ultimately it's just another ultraviolent blastfest that has more or less lifted another game's engine and just retrofitted it with a new graphical style. Only for hardcore shooter fans, I would have to say, but if you're curious this is probably the least expensive way to obtain the commercial version.

YOUR OTHER OPTIONS : The original (much more primitive) version of the game is still available at Newgrounds and other Flash sites; it has also been ported to the PS2, Gamecube and Gameboy Advance; the PDA levels (not the same as the main game) are available for various pocket computers and mobile phones.

Street Fighter 2 : Hyper Fighting
Published by : Capcom
Original Release : Arcade, 1992

For those out there confused by the plethora of versions of Street Fighter 2 - this one is basically SF2 Turbo, the one where you can play as Vega and Sagat and Bison and Balrog, but not the one with Cammy and Dee Jay and soforth. It also moves at a zippier clip than the original SF2 and has had a few moves tweaked for the sake of gameplay balance.

There have been an absolute pile of ports of this game released since it's mid-90's heyday. What this X-Box Live outing primarily aims to offer, however, is a replication of the old arcade scene at it's peak. You can now (ideally) get a match online anytime, participate in tournaments, etc. We've been able to play each other online via MAME and Kaillera for quite some time now, but legality issues aside the advantage of this is to offer a framework in which to keep track of wins/losses and have official rankings for the competitive gamers out there and suchforth.

Aside from the solo experience, the game gives you three modes of play while online - Ranked, in which wins and losses are marked on your record and you're rated along with all the other players; Unranked, which is a sort of emulation of the old "quarter on the monitor" arcade etiquitte from back in the day, where you join a que to watch others play and wait for your shot at the victor; and Quick Match which just sets you up with a one-on-one match with no extra frills.

Certainly not a bad idea on the part of Microsoft and Capcom, but the execution of all this leaves a whole lot to be desired. There's a major issue with lag, and some small glitchiness here and there that seems to cause valid hits to not be registered. There was a major flaw in the Ranked mode of play that allowed people to drop out of a match at any time, negating a loss on their record - this has been patched recently due to mass complaint, but the top ranked fighters are basically a bunch of cheeseballs who exploited other trusting souls by dropping out of matches repeatedly to pad their victory counts (which are usually well into the thousands). At present, the Ranking system is essentialy meaningless. If it's been a while since you've thrown a Hadouken and you need to practice a bit to shake off the rust .... single player mode certainly isn't going to make it easy on you, because even at the lowest difficulty the computer plays at the level of an arcade machine set to it's highest DIP switch rating, pulling off moves that are physically impossible for a human player to do. So single player mode is basically useless for practice purposes, and you won't be able to complete the game unless you're some sort of Street Fighter savant. The Xbox standard
controllers certainly won't make the job any easier for you - the analog controls are really not well suited to games of this nature and are very unresponsive.

Further patching can fix some of these troubles, but at the moment this is a poor play experience and a major disappointment.

YOUR OTHER OPTIONS : Released as Street Fighter 2 Turbo for the Super NES, Sega Genesis, Turbografx 16, Gameboy Advance and PC