For those wondering, yes, I am now on Twitter. I finally cracked in order to more effectively bug people to be on their 3DS friends list. You can follow me at @WhimsicalPhil. Is that how you type it? “At at your user name?” I don’t know. These kids and their internets nowadays. I don’t understand ‘em.
Apparently, the person who was maintaining the fake Whimsical Phil Twitter account shut it down after we talked about it on episode 231. I guess he or she (oh, who am I kidding? He) realized that the jig was up, so there was no point in maintaining the ruse. That left me free to sweep in and reclaim my nickname. Huzzah!
This week! We go on a film tangent early on but eventually get around to talking about our 3DS plans (this episode was recorded before Sunday’s release) and an update of Phil’s Bioware/EA DLC license transfer woes. Then it’s onto the games we’ve been playing this week, including Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, Tapper World Tour, Dead Space 2 and Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime. Join us, won’t you?
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Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!
This week! We’ve got our Beyond Good & Evil Game Club plus tales of customer service, more dead 360s and more.
Please donate to the American Red Cross’ disaster relief efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami in the Pacific. Click here to go to the donation form! You can also donate through your iTunes account by clicking here. Or your Amazon.com account by clicking here.
Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!
Publisher: Sony Imagesoft
Developer: Malibu Interactive
Released: 1993
We’ve already established that Batman Returns on the Sega CD is one of the greatest games in the history of everything. And that mostly had to do with the kick-ass engine used in the driving sequences. So hey, if you’re the people sitting on that technology, the logical thing to do is apply it to another big movie property in the hopes of striking gold one more time.
Malibu Interactive did just that with their Batman Returns engine, this time pinning it to the action flick Cliffhanger – Die Hard on a mountain starring Rambo and that chick from Northern Exposure.
Like Batman Returns, Cliffhanger is mostly a retread of the Genesis title featuring a bit of video and some CD-quality music. And like Batman Returns, Cliffhanger also featured console-exclusive levels (this time in the form of snowboarding areas) with scaling and rotation effects so gorgeous they made 17-year old me want to show the game to every one of my SNES-owning friends just to show them how lame their system really was.
The levels lifted directly from the cartridge game are nothing to get too excited over. Cliffhanger was, for the most part, a pretty lame Final Fight clone, in which Rocky runs from left to right beating up the same two or three bad guys with the same two or three moves. Every now and then you get to pick up a weapon of some sort, which is really effective, but not really enough variety to make these levels all that worthy of play.
And unlike Batman Returns, players weren’t given the option to turn off these ho-hum beat-em-up sections and simply concentrate on the awesome snowboarding bits. Probably because there are only two of them (as far as I know).
The console exclusive levels breaking up this mediocre action might have been enough to save this game if it weren’t for one fatal flaw – extreme difficulty. The difficulty in these snowboarding sections is tuned so high right from the word go that the frustration level for most players will be through the roof inside of about 10 minutes. Considering the first of these levels is the second area of the game, that makes for a pretty short play time overall.
The premise is this: Sly has found himself a snowboard with which he must outrun an avalanche. Along his path are endless amounts of boulders, tunnels, fallen trees, and so on that he must swerve around or jump over. Hit too many of these things, and his life bar is depleted, ending the level. Hit too many of these things in too short a time span (say, about three in a row), and he’s overtaken by the crushing mass of frozen water bearing down on him.
The whole thing smacks of being tuned based on the skills of the QA testers and developers themselves. Someone at the video game factory was way too good at this game, and was apparently taken as representative of the gaming population at large.
Fun Fact: According to Wikipedia, one of the testers on Cliffhanger was none other than David “God of War” Jaffe. I checked the credits, though, and can’t find his name listed anywhere.
One other notable aspect of Cliffhanger is the sheer amount of video included on the disc. It doesn’t sound like much by today’s standards, but this game boasts over 15 minutes of film footage sliced up and used as between-level story bits. Yeah, it’s crappy Sega CD video, but it was still pretty cool to see at the time.
Cliffhanger feels like an early taste of what was to happen with Batman & Robin on the Sega CD (a game that used the same driving engine and featured the same controller-snappin’ difficulty curve). It’s a shame, really. Even though half the game is really nothing to get too excited over, it would have been nice to recapture the magic found in Batman Returns one more time.
Publisher: Good Deal Games
Developer: Digital Pictures
Released: 2004
This is a milestone for the WELCO METOT HENEX TLEVEL series. This is the first game we’ve featured that was developed by the infamous Digital Pictures.
Even if you’ve never heard of the Sega CD, you’ve probably heard of Digital Pictures. Their most famous game – Night Trap – is so not only because it was one of the first FMV games on the market, but it was front and center during the congressional video game violence hearings back in the mid-90s thanks to a “rape” scene partway through the game.
It’s ironic, then, that the first game we look at is the one game they made that wasn’t completely based around full-motion video. Citizen X is actually more of a “video game” in the traditional sense of the term. It’s a side-scrolling action game where you’re racing against the clock to save the city from a terrorist attack. For some reason, everyone around you has succumbed to some sort of gas, but you’re immune…at least for 15 minutes or so.
That’s right. Fifteen minutes. Citizen X has a strict, 15 minute time limit in which you have to fight multiple bosses and find key items in order to thwart the United Vengeance League’s diabolical plot.
Kind of crazy when you think about it. Also incredibly ballzy to try something that different back in the day. And that time limit is even more…limiting…when you realize that the map that must be explored in Citizen X is relatively huge. Plus there are hidden passages and hidden interactive bits that have to be discovered along the way.
And even though this was Digital Pictures’ single foray out of their FMV comfort zone, there are still a generous amount of poorly acted, over-the-top cut scenes peppered throughout the game. The villain and his various minions revel in taunting and threatening you through your wristwatch communicator as you near different objectives.
A few of these scenes actually aren’t done. And if you paid attention to the release date up top, you can probably guess why: Citizen X was never finished and released. It’s one of the handful of Sega CD games that Good Deal Games has since revived and put on the market. While the main game play of Citizen X is all there, there are whole scenes and effects that are missing.
Not that it matters too much. Digital Pictures had zero experience developing a more traditional video game, and it shows in Citizen X. The controls are pretty clunky, with a weird momentum system in place for the running that makes it feel very unresponsive, and a fighting system that’s more or less useless. Not to mention you really need to invest in the whole experience if you want to see any sort of success.
It’s kind of a shame the game was never released back in the day, as I think the sheer creativity of it would have helped Digital Pictures’ rep a tiny bit, though the quality definitely wouldn’t have done them any favors.
This week! We’re down a Greg, but that’s OK since we spend half of this week’s episode talking about Pokémon Black & White and the other half talking about franchises.
Please donate to the American Red Cross’ disaster relief efforts to help those affected by the earthquake in Japan and tsunami in the Pacific. Click here to go to the donation form! You can also donate through your iTunes account by clicking here. Or your Amazon.com account by clicking here.
Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!
This week! A little GDC (3DS/NGP), Great Gatsby, BIT.TRIP RUNNER, Days of Thunder, Dead Space 2: Severed, Zelda memories, Dreamcast or Saturn, Super Mario 3DS, character idle animations and oh so much more. Like Flubber.
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Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to visit our new web site at www.playeronepodcast.com. You can leave us a voicemail by calling 713-893-8069 or you can send a comment via MP3 to our email address, playeronepodcast@gmail.com. Don’t forget to join our forums if you haven’t already!
When last we saw Chuck, he was busy saving his wife Ophelia from local weirdo Garry Gritter. And according to the intro of Chuck Rock II, once our prehistoric hero had rescued his sweetie, he went on to invent the first automobile, amassing a large fortune in the process.
The only thing that was missing from Chuck and Ophelia’s perfect life was an heir to the family fortune. Enter Junior: chip off the ol’ Rock and hero of our new story.
Seems Chuck’s got a rival in Brick Jagger, a local inventor who has decided that, rather than creating his own line of vehicles, he’ll just hire some muscle to kidnap Chuck instead. And while Ophelia loses her mind over the loss of her husband, Junior sets off on his own to save his dad, armed only with a club and the diaper around his bottom.
Chuck Rock was a decent game, and apparently that’s all you needed back in the day to warrant a sequel. Son of Chuck plays pretty much the same as the previous game in the series, featuring a series of mostly side-scrolling levels filled with dinosaurs to club, platforms to climb, and bosses to bash.
The first impression I got when firing up Chuck Rock II was how much more refined it seems to be than its predecessor. The voice work is a thousand times better, the animation has lost that strange, Core style and adopted a much more fitting Flintstones motif. The presentation is just generally better by a mile.
The game play has been upgraded slightly, too, thanks mostly to the fact that Junior carries around a big club. In the original game, Chuck had to rely on his beer gut to dole out punishment. While that was fitting for the character, it really didn’t offer much in the way of range. Junior’s club, on the other hand, lets the little tyke stay a bit further out of harm’s way as he smashes his way through the legion of cartoon bad guys standing between him and his dad.
But despite these upgrades, Chuck II still suffers from the same generally mediocre action of the prequel. Dozens of surprisingly short levels make up the game world, and outside of the odd, large-ish creature to fight, there really isn’t anything all that exciting going on.
Looking back now, it’s amazing to me how much staying power these characters seemed to have. Not only were there two games in the main series (released to all the major consoles), there was also a kart racer, and apparently a regular comic appearing in a popular kids’ magazine in the UK – LookIn. Unfortunately, the comic only lasted about a year before the magazine itself went under. The final scene featured Chuck being swept away from his boat. He washed ashore on a tribal island and was revered as a god by the locals.
Weird.
Anyway, this is the end for Chuck in this particular series of articles. I know you’ll all miss him as much as I will.
It’s that time again! Time for another entry in our increasingly infrequent Game Club! As we discussed on a recent episode, we’ve decided to tackle Michel Ancel’s beloved Beyond Good & Evil. The game is currently available on PS2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC. Ubisoft just released an HD port on Xbox Live Arcade for a measly 800 Allards (that’s only $10 in regular monies). It’s also coming to PSN, well, sometime later.
Beyond Good & Evil may not have set the sales charts on fire when it was originally released in 2003, but it received tons of praise from professional reviewers and fans alike. Why do you love this game so much? Let us know! Maybe–just maybe–this Game Club will convince Ubisoft to finish up Beyond Good & Evil 2.
We’ll be discussing Beyond Good & Evil on episode 230 of the Player One Podcast, so get playing and share your comments and/or memories. You can post them in the comments section of this blog post, in the official thread on our forums, drop us an email, or leave a voicemail (713-893-8069).
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