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: 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.