Despite the well-known cheat code, I was disappointed by Shattered Soldier, a 2-D action game in which you continually move forward while eradicating as many opponents as possible. Out of a sense of fairness, I asked Matt to come over and play it and give me his expert opinion. "Wow, it's Contra," he said when he saw the game, by which he meant that the sequel looked very much like the original. He played for a while, but quickly lost interest.
His final analysis: "If you really, really loved Contra and you're looking for a game that doesn't have any of the technological improvements of the past 15 years, this is the one to buy."
I also wanted Matt to give me his thoughts on Shinobi, a sequel to the 1988 game of the same name. Matt brought his Sega Master System game console and the original Shinobi game to my apartment so I could compare the two.
Unlike Contra, Shinobi looks nothing like its 2-D side-scrolling precursor. While you still put a ninja through his paces, this game takes place in three dimensions and has some stylish visual flourishes. Your ninja wears a red scarf that ripples in the wind, you can run along walls, and if you kill several enemies very quickly, your ninja will dramatically sheath his sword as the bodies fall around him.
While it looks impressive, Shinobi suffers from repetitive level designs that quickly left us bored. Matt spent more time replaying the original Shinobi for me than he did playing the sequel, and was more excited by reaching a heretofore unvisited level in the original than by anything in the other games.
Sending Matt home, I proceeded to try out yet another sequel, Dragon's Lair 3-D. The original Dragon's Lair had far better graphics than the other games of 1983, because it was all animated.
The game was a series of short cartoons containing points at which you needed to tap a button. The correct button took you to another cartoon showing your success; the wrong one took you to your death. The original Dragon's Lair was released recently as a game you can play on a DVD player. But if it is representative of the game in its original form, then it is one of the most frustrating and annoying games ever created. I died time after time after time.
Happily, the sequel retains much of the game's cartoonish charm without the horrendous game play. Dragon's Lair 3-D is a straightforward platformer in which the protagonist, Dirk the Daring, must climb ropes, jump on moving platforms and battle cute dragons and multiple-eyed monsters to save the kidnapped Princess Daphne. The levels are well-designed and varied, with frustrating but ultimately rewarding puzzles and simple but exciting action.
Although it was made 20 years later, it lacks some of the visual panache of the original. The 1983 animated Dirk was fluid and comical, but here Dirk is a standard computer emulation of a cartoon character; he looks looks stiff and bland. The goofy death scenes of the original are gone; here Dirk dies with little fanfare.
But I would rather play a good game with fair graphics than a maddeningly unplayable game with great graphics.
Dragon's Lair 3-D was the most entertaining of the sequels I played, but the most impressive was easily Metroid Prime, the first new entry in the Metroid series since Super Metroid in 1994.
A fantastically atmospheric game, Metroid Prime lets the player explore Tallon IV, a bizarre planet of strange, mutated plants and creatures. The dangers one faces are wonderfully diverse: swarms of explosive insects, barbed weeds that hide in the ground when shot at and huge frogs that can only be killed from the inside. Tallon IV is so detailed and complex that playing it is like exploring a living, breathing world.
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When a giant frog blocks the exit, you need some special equipment to kill it, and much of Prime involves gaining items that allow you to enter new areas.
A missile launcher will blast through reinforced doors, a morph ball allows you to contract into a ball and roll through small passages, and a grappling hook can pull you up to high places. Much of Tallon IV is inaccessible as the game begins, and each new gadget is a reason to retrace your steps and search for new entryways. Thus, rather than moving steadily forward, the player travels outward as the available world expands.
Once you obtain the attachment that allows you to drop explosive devices from the morph ball, the first thing you will want to do is get that frog to swallow you.
While Shattered Soldier seems to have ignored almost every advance of game development, Metroid Prime is the opposite, a game that does not miss a single technological trick. Something as simple as the spacesuit visor through which one views Tallon IV shows remarkable attention to detail. Look up at the rainy sky and drops of water form on the visor, walk through steam and there is condensation, get near a bright explosion and you can see the face of the protagonist reflected on the inside surface.
Prime's roots in 1980's-style arcade games are almost unrecognizable, yet the game has doggedly held onto an 80's trait: an insistence on severely limiting when a game's progress can be saved.
There are only a few, inconvenient locations where saving is possible, and after a difficult battle one has a choice between taking a circuitous route back to the last save point or continuing forward to an unknown save point farther on, meanwhile risking a death that will result in the need to fight a terrible battle once again.
This kind of aggravation was a key component of video games in the 80's, and of the four games I played, only Dragon's Lair 3-D went for the gentler approach of letting the player save anywhere. Some gamers object to frequent saves, saying it takes all the challenge out of a game, but you should not complain about games being too easy if, 15 years later, you can still recite "Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, start."
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