REVIEW: Hogan's Alley

Game: Hogan's Alley
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: December 2010
Rating: 3 Stars


Do you love light guns but are sick of laughing dogs? Do you think target identification is the best part of a shooter? Do you have difficulty shooting the broad side of a barn? Then Hogan’s Alley may be for you! Hogan’s Alley is a light gun shooter that attempts to replicate a police training simulation. I guess law enforcement standards are slipping because the game allows you a ton of mistakes and the enormous stationary targets are nearly impossible to miss.

PROTIP: Pick GAME C.

You get three game modes to choose from. Hogan’s Alley A is a strict target range simulation with three targets presented. When the targets are revealed, the player will have a limited amount of time to identify and shoot the criminals in the batch. The best thing about this mode is that it actually could help hone your skills on target recognition as a practical skill. However, sticking with the convention of rolling out the targets and then flipping them is tedious and unnecessary. You can expect to spend much more time waiting for targets to slowly roll onto the board than you will spend shooting at them. Imagine Duck Hunt if you had to spend 10 seconds watching the ducks paddle around in a pond before you could shoot them. Also, while the time available to shoot tends to decrease as the rounds go on, it is still variable and may one round may give you significantly less time than the next. It would make more sense if it gradually and steadily decreased as the player progressed.

The Professor and his identical meth head brother.

Hogan’s Alley B is similar to A but has a bit more atmosphere. The target range gets an urban setting and the target layout and behavior changes slightly. This mode is a bit more interesting than the first and it does cut down on the waiting between rounds, but it still gets old pretty quickly. After your first time through the different screens, you will have seen all there is to see. You are still picking targets and avoiding civilians, but when the tedium sets in, it is difficult not to blast everything in sight. Of particular note is the Professor who dresses EXACTLY like one of the gang members in an attempt to draw your fire and bait the department into a costly law suit. If you can avoid shooting him out of spite, you are a better man than I.

This is as good as it ever gets.

They saved the best for last with Trick Shot. In this mode, tin cans will fly onto the screen from the right and you must shoot them to keep them in the air and moving all the way to the gaps on the left side for varying amounts of points. There is a bit of strategy in that the more dangerous lower gap give you more points and it will take quick and accurate shooting to keep scoring. This mode is by far the most entertaining and there is a bit of strategy in how you keep the cans aloft and how to maximize your score. There is plenty of shooting here and the smaller, moving targets does ratchet up the challenge. Probably the best part is that Professor jerk face is nowhere to be found.

It's like using a Colt to sort your recycling.

It’s unfortunate that the main modes of Hogan’s Alley just aren’t much fun. It might be worth some time if you are actually trying to cultivate target recognition skills, but it’s going to take a lot of patience. You have to make 10 mistakes before the game ends, and I’m not sure why the game gives you so many chances. Three would have been sufficient, even for the faster paced Trick Shot mode. Ten chances stretches the games out for far too long. Trick Shot is quite an amusing shooting mini-game, and any enjoyment to be found in Hogan’s Alley is here. If the other modes were as fun, then we could have had a bull-eye here. As it stands, most people will have more fun with Duck Hunt.



Review in a Haiku
Shooting and snoozing.
Self inflicted light gun wounds.
Thank god for the cans.

REVIEW: Golf

Game: Golf
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: November 2010
Rating: 6 Stars


Golf on the NES is a game where a Mario knock-off guy tries to hit a tiny ball into a tiny hole 18 times. In keeping with the spirit of the links (the grassy kind, not Zelda’s boyfriend) I will attempt to review this game in scorecard format.

Above Par

+ Golf has an excellent club selection with 14 clubs. All your irons, woods, wedges and a putter are represented.

+ Have you played Wii Sports Golf? Then you will recognize the course right away. The 9 holes of Wii Sports golf are based on the holes from NES Golf.

ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?!?!?!

+ Timing the swing was tricky enough to be consistently challenging. Adjusting the force of your club swing never feels unfair.

+ The first time I actually hit par on a hole was oddly thrilling. Pulling off the shot you want is a rewarding experience.

+ Intuitive enough that a non-sports gamer like myself felt comfortable with the interface after the first hole.

+ Aiming putts is consistent and accurate. I wish I could putt this well in Wii Sports Golf.

+ Two player mode is fun and competitive.

+ Fills the elusive “Games my Mom Could Play” niche.

+ Mario! Sort of. Because the features aren't quite spot on it feels like Mario concept art and that gives it some small degree of street cred.


In the Rough

- Golf?! Really?! That’s the best name the chimps in marketing could come up with?

- The course design feels random. Often you will find the fairway to be a series of islands.

A course is a course, of course, of course.

- There is a line of trees to indicate the Out of Bounds line, but beyond that is all blackness. It’s like the Langoliers ate the rest of the world.

- There is no distance indicator/estimator built into the interface. The only way you know how far your stroke of any given club will go is by your own experience.

- The lack of a running score card makes it difficult to chart your progress per hole.

- The view of Mario swinging the club is useless. The change in terrain that shows at his feet seems random and does not add any new information to the screen.

- The aiming for the drives and chips is horrible. Why not use the excellent aiming present when putting?

- Since the game is turn based, they could have implemented 4 players easily by sharing a single controller. This would have really helped since sports games tend to be more fun in groups.

- No in-game music. And a congratulatory theme after each hole would have been nice. Sound is sparse.

Slow, SLOW DOWN, WHY WON'T YOU STOP ROLLING!!

I believe Mark Twain defined Golf video games as good sit spoiled. This prototypical Golf game seems to hit birdies and bogies in equal number. It would make sense to score this game right down the middle, but the fun factor counts for a lot. Even though I had decided before I started that I was going to hate this game, I ended up having a lot of fun with it. I can see myself coming back to Golf in the future. One could do worse than to spend some time with Golf.



Review in a Haiku
Swing, cheer, swing, grumble,
Swing, swear, swing, throw controller,
Swing, sigh, putt, putt, plop.

REVIEW: Clu Clu Land

Game:Clu Clu Land
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: November 2010
Rating: 5 Stars



When I was a kid, I honestly thought this game was about the dudes with the white pointy hats. I mean it always struck me as kind of odd that they would have their own game, and I kind of assumed they were the bad guys in said game...but I didn’t get the plumber-mushroom-turtle connection with Mario either so I just wrote it off as one of those strange Japanese things. It turns out the hat guys have a slightly different name, and Clu Clu Land is actually about Bubbles the Bubblefish trying to recover the treasure of the sea kingdom from some jerk face sea urchins called the Unira.

Clu Clu review, Mrs. Robinson.

The catch is that the treasure is invisible and you are being chased by the angry sea urchin critters. You run all over the field and trip over the gold bars (which look like Rupees from Zelda) by chance. Typically the treasure is laid out in a symmetrical pattern to make a picture so that once you find enough, you can estimate the rest by anticipating the design. Clu Clu Land plays a bit like a wide open version of Pac Man if all the dots and the occasional obstacles were invisible. You can stun the enemies with your Sound Wave (sea urchin have ears?) and crush them into walls for bonus points.

Avoid the Unira. Which are probably contagious.

The hook to the game play is the directional control. When you change direction, you hang an arm out to grab hold the poles that make up the grid and spin yourself around. You can tap the D Pad to make a quick turn, or hold it down to spin around and around. This is probably the most original feature of the game, and while I found it to be originally quite off-putting, I grew to appreciate the strategy that it added. You can’t just head off to the other side of the screen, you have to plan a path based on obstacle and enemy locations and use careful timing to pull it off successfully. That being said, the control is never quite intuitive and causes more deaths than the enemies do.

Clu Clu Land on cards?! What a deal!

What replay value that Clu Clu Land has comes from trying to top your previous high score. This may be fine for old school gamers, but don’t look for an ending to this one. The game has 22 levels and if you can get that far, it repeats with having to run over each bar twice. There is also some fun to be had with two player mode which is simultaneous. Trying to score higher than player two leads you to take more chances and is generally more fun than playing by yourself, but not by much.

Clu Clu Land is the first NES entry into the maze game genre. However, Pac Man is still the biggest shark in that pond, and when you compare the two games side to side, Clu Clu loses badly. This is one of those times when the designers go out on a limb and try something new and it doesn’t quite pan out. On its own, it was a fun diversion that manages to be briefly amusing despite the handicap of its controls scheme.



Review in a Haiku
Try to play Pac Man
Blindfolded and with your feet.
Behold! Clu Clu Land!

REVIEW: Super Mario Bros.

Game: Super Mario Bros.
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: November 2010
Rating: 10 stars


I can hardly imagine a reader audience that would need a basic description of Super Mario Bros. In the event that you are under the age of 8, I’ll tell you that this is a game in which Mario runs and jumps through dozens of levels to defeat Bowser and save the princess. This game is the quintessential archetype of the scrolling platform action genre. Super Mario Bros. is the mold from which thousands of subsequent games have been cast. It is impossible to overstate its importance when discussing modern video gaming.

Every sprite in this game is making $7 million a year in royalties.

Super Mario Bros. (SMB) created or popularized a huge number of video game characteristics. Background music played during game play, scrolling levels that extend beyond a single screen, the entire platform hopping mechanic, swimming levels with alternate control schemes and warp zones that allowed crafty players to skip levels were traits that were popularized by SMB. It also featured tight and responsive controls that allowed for influencing speed and direction in mid-jump and secret rewards designed to emphasize creativity and exploration while traversing levels. These elements may have been used previously, in other platform games such as Pitfall 2, Jungle Hunt or the original Mario Brothers, but SMB elevated them in such a way that it is nearly impossible to point to a NES game since that did not seek to emulate some or all of the elements laid out by SMB.

Total hotness

The music in SMB also deserves particular attention. The tune itself is enduring enough to be catchy to this day and has been rewritten, updated and integrated into dozens of Nintendo titles up to present day. While earlier games did not typically include music during game play, almost all games after had to have it as the bar had been raised. Even if removed from its historical context, the music is wonderful, catchy and thoroughly appropriate for the game.

Anyway, back to the review. Super Mario Bros. holds up remarkably well. The game is still fun and challenging without being old school hard. If you played it back in the day, your hands will still know what to do. If you have never seen it before, then you’ll still have a great time with it. The graphics, sound and control all outshine every other NES launch title by a long stretch. There can be no debate that SMB is king.

In the end, Mario didn’t just save

Seriously, this game needs to be played.

the princess. He saved video games. At the time of the video game crash of ‘84, most retailers thought video games were proven to be a burned-out fad. Interest in the game industry was at a huge low point, and if the NES didn’t take off, console gaming would be set back even further. PCs might be the only way to play games today if Mario hadn’t shown up. And for that, maybe the original Super Mario Bros. deserves another look.



Review in a Haiku
Thank you, Mario.
Twenty five years of castles
and no end in sight.

REVIEW: Pinball

Game: Pinball
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: October 2010
Rating: 5 Stars



Pinball is video pinball game developed by Nintendo. It chronicles the epic story of a ball and its journey to bump into things and increase the score. It features two screens of bumpers, drop targets and bonuses. Targets include seals, penguins, baby birds and classical pinball elements. If you are lucky or skillful, you can find the bonus round and help Mario save the girl.

Where is the theme here? Weak, at best.

There is a wide variety of different targets to shoot for, and this does a good job of making the two screens feel very different from each other. For an early pinball game, it does a good job of keeping the screen busy and packed with targets. This helps stave off the long, dry stretches that were present in Atari pinball games. The bonus round was a nice addition, and bouncing the ball on Mario to break through the wall and free the princess made a nice change of pace to the traditional pinball screens.

Pinball has a number of flaws which keep it from being a true classic. The ball behavior tends to be rather light and floaty. This is a common problem with earlier video pinball games, so it is easy to forgive. There is no common theme to the boards and targets, and this makes the tables feel like playing pinball in a garage sale. Many other pinball games have a tilt feature, which often gives a little extra influence over the ball behavior. I’m not sure if Pinball omits this as a design decision or a technical limitation, but it does limit your “sphere of influence”. There are no multipliers on the table and this makes high scoring games more a matter of endurance than skill. Finally, Pinball really would have benefited from music beyond what played during the title screen.

In modern video pinball games there are two schools of thought. Simulation type pinball games take great care to accurately reproduce the sights, sounds and physics of an actual pinball table as accurately as possible. This can provide all of the fun and excitement of a physical table and make us miss the classic arcades and pizza parlors.

For the record that is Pauline from Donkey Kong. Not Daisy, not Peach.

The other option is to embrace the video game aspect and use unreal environments, movable targets and boss battles that would not be possible on a physical table.

This Pinball attempts a middle road between the two...and falls short at both. It’s not hard to guess that Pinball loses its appeal pretty quickly. The lack of a theme probably hurts it the worst. A couple changes in sprites and sounds, and this could have been a much more entertaining “Mario Pinball”. Modern pinball machines work best when they put the player into sensory overload with flashing lights and sounds. However Pinball does very little to capture and deliver that energy and you are left with a competent but dreary rendition of the game. Video pinball games have come a long way since Pinball, and in this case you really can’t go home again.

REVIEW: Ice Climber

Game: Ice Climber
Original Launch: October 1985
Relaunch: October 2010
Rating: 3 Stars


Ice Climber is a vertical platform game developed by Nintendo. In this game you play Popo and Nana, two Eskimos chasing a condor up a mountain to recover stolen vegetables.

Which one is the pterodactyl?

I’m pretty sure that the condor is actually a pterodactyl but that doesn’t make the premise make any more sense. Because Western audiences were overly sensitive to the topic of baby seal clubbing, the baby seals in the Japanese version were changed to ferocious Hoth Wampa beasts. Also present are the obligatory annoying birds. Other characters include a polar bear who wears sunglasses and a bathing suit, just in case you aren’t taking global warming seriously.

Fearsome Hoth Wampa beast pictured above

You ascend each of 32 mountains by running, jumping, sliding around on various platforms. Each mountain is pretty short but punctuated by 7 or 8 impossible jumps. Near the top you reach the bonus round in which you collect your stolen veggies and reap bloody revenge on that condor/pterodactyl thing. The jumping is twitchy, imprecise and frustrating to the extreme, so your odds of getting to the top of any level past the first few are pretty bleak. As luck would have it, you can hammer pretty much any enemy in the game as long as they are at ground level. You can kill flying enemies by jumping into them as long as you have reached a certain height of your jump before bumping the enemy. This is actually pretty confusing and amounts to yet another frustrating facet of game play.

32 levels of this...

The characters from Ice Climber are playable characters in the Smash Bros. series of fighting games. However, the inclusion Popo and Nana in a series about staying on a platform is about as appropriate as including Amy Winehouse in a game about sobriety. It also features a co-op mode which could be fun if you were a clinical psychologist chronicling Player 2’s spiraling decent into madness.

The problem is that even after you suffer through the learning curve and master the horrible jumping, the game never really becomes fun.

Honestly I really did want to love this game due to the bizarre premise and cute characters, but the punishing and frustrating game play made playing through the game’s 32 levels feel about as painful as climbing 32 mountains.

Videogames are Dead

      And good riddance. I totally dropped $200 on my Atari VCS at Sears back when it first came out in 1977. I know a lot of other people did, and it was pretty cool to be jumping on this new “video game” fad. Mostly, you have to go to arcades to play the best games, but the VCS lets you play arcade games at home. Before that, your only home options were variations on Pong, and you could only play them when friends came over. But the VCS gave us tons of great games at first. Nobody at school could beat my high score at Space Invaders! Pac-Man wasn’t as good as the arcade, but it was still pretty cool. I spent a ton of money on games, but you never really knew when you would get an expensive dud. Those were few and far between at first, but then things changed.

      Atari made all the games and the programmers who worked there and wrote the games weren’t allowed to sign their names to their work like authors or musicians can. Sometimes they snuck their names or initials in the games, and if you were clever, you could find it. They were also annoyed that they got paid the same if their game was a smash hit or a total flop. So one day a bunch of them quit and started to make their own games. They started a company called Activision, and they made (generally speaking) better games than Atari did. They put their names on the games and they had photos of the creators in the manuals. It was kind of like being a rock star because if people liked one of your games, they could easily find others that you wrote. But it turned out that Activision’s awesome games were the beginning of the end for the video game industry.

      The problem was that when people saw that you could make a company and release your own video games, everybody wanted to do it. They hired away Atari programmers and reverse-engineered the hardware to make cartridges of their own. Some places made great games like Parker Brothers, but most of them were not so good. Things started spiraling downward. Customers were tired of paying $20 for games that turned out to be horrible. Most of the low-quality titles were bad rip-offs of games that Atari made years ago. So the low budget game publishers started making games cheaper and faster to replace quality with quantity. Toy retailers were sick of buying bad games that wouldn’t sell and so they dumped the rest of their stock and stopped carrying video games. Atari was struggling for cash since Pac-Man and ET didn’t sell nearly as well as they thought they would. Other consoles were released like the ColecoVision that started eating into Atari’s hardware profits as well. In 1983 Atari was sold, and it doesn’t look like its ever going to be the same. Dozens of game publishers also went out of business, crushed under the weight of disenchanted retailers and customers.

      So I had bought a dozen games that year, and none of them were any good. All of them played like a horrible version of Space Invaders or Pac-Man. This told me that game makers had run out of new ideas and that this video game fad has burned itself out. I sold all my stupid video games to buy something with lasting value that will never get boring. Toy robots! Seriously, everybody loves robots now and they are all over the place. Kids can’t get enough of them this year! The only way I would ever consider buying video games is if, like, I had a robot that would play with me. Yeah, like robot games! I bet that’s what that new Nintendo thing is going to be. It’s got a neato keen robot on the front of the box and I think it might hook up to the TV or something, but from all the ads it looks like it’s all about the robot. Well if they are just using the robot to swindle us into buying video games, they should pick a better name than R.O.B. Maybe L.A.R.C.E.N.Y. was already taken.