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Hal’s Hole in One Golf, presumably named for it’s developer HAL Laboratory which sadly robbed the U.S. of Jumbo Ozaki no Hole in One Professional as it was known in Japan, is as frustrating to review as it is to play. There are some aspects of the game that are terrible. Unrealistic, oddly designed and unintuitive. On the other hand, it is a golf game from 1991 and was probably fine back then. Not great, maybe not even good but fine. Fortunately, my time spent playing various golf video games through the 90′s mixed with playing the actual game (like outside, in real life!) makes me unusually aware of where this game stands in the golf game evolution.

For very real reasons the first golf games enhanced the difficulty of on course challenges. Hitting your ball into the rough or a bunker essentially cost you a stroke because only short yardage clubs worked from these areas. This has some loose basis in reality but exists to increase game difficulty thus increasing the importance of mastery. An important aspect for arcade games and a theme this blog often touches on. However, I could walk onto a course right now and hit a ball 180 yards out of a fairway bunker. And unless you’re playing in knee high British Open style rough you can go ahead and break out that 5-iron. In other words this is not realistic. But the available technology demanded a suspension of reality otherwise the game would be incredibly easy so we can easily forgive these design choices.

The putting mechanics in Hal’s HiOG are unforgivable. The meter moves with an insane speed that makes every putt an instantaneous double button tap with a quick prayer to the video game gods. Initially, the frustration feels like the worst part of this design but after a few holes the lack of variety in the most importance aspect of the game becomes tedious. The crappy design makes every putt the same experience robbing the player of the necessary tension to feel rewarded by success. And this becomes to the games downfall. It’s unplayable due to this one design choice. Now I’m sure the design is to add replay-ability to a game with only one course but plenty of other games with the same design limitations found ways around this.

The imaginary me who received an SNES for Christmas in 1991 probably would have received this game as well. (Let’s just say I know my Dad.) I probably would have enjoyed it because I would not have known better and it would have been one of the few games I had. As a kid I never thought games were bad, I always assumed the fault as with me. Probably, explains more about my life than I am comfortable with. But HHiOG is exactly the game I dreaded when I undertook this endeavor. A game limited by technology and flawed in design. The design flaws are even more glaring in a world with Hot Shots Golf making the game impossible to enjoy for me. A mediocre game all around made unplayable by time.

I have a few more games to play through before really hitting the meat of ’91 Christmas releases. I’ve played a little of the surprisingly fun HyperZone and even less of the indecipherable Populous. Hopefully, have some thoughts on those in the coming week. I’m still playing Skyward Sword and while it is very good I am dangerously close to the same wall I hit with all Zelda games – I just don’t give a shit about the story or characters. Maybe I’ll elaborate more later this weekend.

Super R-Type. A side-scrolling shooter renowned for it’s difficulty. I know I say every game is really hard but the design of Super R-Type makes it substantially harder than any other SNES game released before it. Granted that’s only a handful of games but – wait, I figured out how to explain this – remember all the bitching I did about how hard Gradius III is? How robbing you of any upgrades and dropping you at a checkpoint is actually a laughable way to ask someone to beat your game? Well, Super R-Type is harder then that. I would say three times as hard because I made it three time as far into Gradius III as I have through Super R-Type.

The game’s difficulty comes from roots firmly planted in an arcade style of design (i.e. please insert quarter) and a lack of checkpoints. Dying means you have to restart the entire level. If you aren’t experienced in side-scrolling shooters the levels are long, increasingly difficult as they progress and demand equal parts skill and memorization. Restarting the entire level after dying would be like restarting an entire world in Super Mario Bros. because you died. But Super R-Type has had me thinking about something besides how awful I am at video games. Is it fair for me to review/critique this game? Is it fair for anyone to critique a genre piece if they aren’t a fan of that genre?

I do think Super R-Type is a good game. It’s fun, challenging and has an interesting weapons upgrade system that adds variety and strategy. But I would never suggest someone play it unless they were a fan of the scrolling shooter genre. So how does one review it? Labeling it “For Fans Only” feels reductive and dismissive. But comparing it to other games places demands on the gameplay that an arcade inspired shooter is not interested in meeting. These games are about commitment, they throw down the gauntlet and see who can meet the challenger. They are about skillz. And this is very unique to video games when it comes to media.

Appreciating the elegant prose of Lolita. Becoming lost in the transcendent depths of Moby Dick. Staying awake during Last Year at Mariendbad. These are matters of education. The intellectual challenge can be overcome through engaging teaching. But you cannot be taught how to play Super R-Type, you acquire skill over hours of gameplay and might never reach the level necessary to experience the whole game. So as someone who will never reach that level how can I comment on the experience of playing the game? There is beauty in giving someone that surge of elation we all experience after overcoming a challenge. But I only experience the frustration and lack the knowledge of how Super R-Type feels to play. The emotions the game is capable of eliciting will remain foreign to me forever.

There is a simple beauty in the difficulty of Super R-Type and I don’t entirely understand it. But maybe it taps into a primal need we all have to prove ourselves. To others and to ourselves.

Pilotwings. Goddamn Pilotwings. I really do love this game, it’s just very difficult. Fortunately, victory feels extremely rewarding making the difficulty worthwhile. It’s also worth pointing out that flying and landing a plane, sky diving to hit a target, and hang gliding for a target are really, really hard in real life so the difficult gameplay feels more realistic than cheap. (I will assume flying around with a Rocket Belt is accurately portrayed as well.)

The graphics are astounding for a launch title. Utilizing the same Mode 7 3D graphics engine from F-Zero, Pilotwings creates realistic 3D environments even allowing the player to occasionally change their dimensional perspective to better navigate all three dimensions. For the time these graphics were groundbreaking and more than made up for the extreme challenge of mastering the game. In fact the challenge better helps one appreciate the graphics as you navigate each level over and over.

The gameplay is a mix of addictive arcade challenge with realistic flight simulator thrown on top. Landing the light plane takes a few tries but is easily mastered within a normal amount of time, the rocket belt is by far the easiest to control, sky diving is difficult but through trial and error most levels can be figured out to beat consistently but that leaves the hang glider. The fucking hang glider. Insanely difficult barely begins to describe mastering the hang glider. The controls are sensitive and the landing areas are small and often surrounded by water that results in a total failure for landing in. After a few hours of practice with it I can beat most levels in a few tries but it’s combining this with success in the other tests that has me bashing my head against the wall.

The game is set up as a series of license tests. Each test has a series of challenges i.e. land the plane, sky dive through rings that are worth a certain amount of points. You add up the points from each challenge to see if you earned enough for your license and to move on to the next level. Doing well on all the tests in a row is what makes the game so challenging. Crashing the plane after an awesome hang glider run probably has taken years off my life. I might have a stroke at the rate I’m going. But when you string those successful runs together, damn it is satisfying. Pilotwings gives that wonderful feeling of accomplishment that is so elusive in most games.

Unfortunately I am still stuck at an embarrassingly low level. If the game only featured these license tests I wouldn’t mind moving on to the next game (the also insanely difficult Super R-Type) but after passing all the tests you are sent on a helicopter rescue mission where you must evade enemy fire. That’s a kick ass pay off! I will keep plugging away at the game but it will probably take a while. I suppose I could find the continue code online but the whole point of this is to have fun and that just doesn’t feel fun.

What I really love about the game is the re-playability. Several levels feature secret Bonus areas that give you a chance for a higher score and finding all of these is a great value for anyone throwing themselves into the game. A scoring system where perfect runs are possible reminds of playing games from this generation as a kid. You couldn’t afford many games so all summer long you’d just play what you had over and over. Pilotwings is the perfect game for that and probably why my affection for it is so high. If I had owned this game at ten years old I would have played for hours on end trying to master every level. Games like this are why I want to play through the SNES catalogue.

Pilotwings concludes the first month of SNES releases and wraps up the launch titles. I’ll write a full wrap up later but a very solid launch lineup. I did not like SimCity but it’s certainly not a terrible game. But don’t worry, the terrible games are coming. Oh my, are they coming.

F-Zero is insanely overrated. I’ve felt this way for a long time and after a week and a half of play I still feel that way. Look, in 1991 the Mode 7 graphics were stunning. The speed was unreal. But it’s not 1991 so it can no longer hide behind it’s graphics.

For those of you who don’t know what Mode 7 means (i.e. sane people) here is a dumb downed description not because I don’t respect you but because it’s the only way I understand it. One of the big selling points to developers (and one of the reason the SNES was such a great system) for the SNES were several different ways to program for the system. These were called modes and I believe there were 8 of them. Mode 7 allowed games to simulate 3D environments that were groundbreaking at the time. Essentially a 3D world was created and would rotate around on screen elements. This made it perfect for racing games. Aside from F-Zero it would later be used in Mario Kart which, in an interesting aside, was inspired by F-Zero’s lack of multiplayer. F-Zero moves so fast the SNES can’t handle split screen action but Nintendo figured a go-cart inspired racer would not demand such speed and from there Mario Kart evolved. F-Zero has a forced 3D perspective that probably represents the first modern racer.

Anyway.

F-Zero features three race circuits with (mostly) unique courses. I beat the Knight circuit but stalled out mid-way through the Queen Circuit and can’t do much with King. Now the problem with this criticism is that times have changed. F-Zero, for better or worse, is as much about memorization as skill. This adds replayability to an extremely short game with no multi-player. Memorizing all the turns of each course quickly becomes work and once a game becomes work I am gone. Finally, defeating a course never gave me the elation that often comes from these frustrating arcade style games but a bored feeling of what’s next. (I can speak to this because I celebrated like Tiger Woods winning the Masters after passing Lesson 3 in Pilotwings this morning.)

I guess I should stop complaining and talk more about the gameplay. The premise places the game in the not too distant future where bored billionaires have created a high stakes hovercar racing league to gamble on or something. Not the most dysfunctional dystopia but a solid racing premise. The game features unique hovercars with their own strengths and weaknesses. The courses have some kind of energy bars around the edges that drain your defense shield when hit (not too mention slow you down). Impacting other racers drains your energy shield as well. Each course has a brief moving pit stop that allows you to recharge your shield. A great innovation as it adds some needed strategy to a pure speed game.

The early courses are basic affairs where you can hold down the gas and more or less fly through with ease. Later levels have turbo pads, jumps, magnets and other challenges to make the courses become increasingly frustrating. The sharp turns that creep up in the later levels really demand a planned attack for each course that can only come from dozens of times racing through each course and a great deal of skill.

As a showcase for a new system the game is perfect. It’s fast, a serious step up in graphics and demonstrates 3D as the future of gaming. Unfortunately, the actual gameplay relies on old school arcade gimmicks to create re-playability and the lack of a mulit-player mode is a serious flaw. It takes a certain kind of gamer to love F-Zero and I am not that kind of gamer. You really have to put the time in the learn each course. The kind of game that takes months to master and probably needs to be played that way. A slow plodding movement towards victory.

Also, I may have mentioned this but I am not good at video games. I love games, I can’t get enough of playing them but I am not particularly good at them. This seems to confuse people and I don’t understand why. No one assumes the guy who plays golf every weekend must be good. No one assumes jut because their grandmother knits she can make a killer sweater. Gaming, like most hobbies, does not require excellence to enjoy. Individual games do though and I think this may come up often in my quest to play the SNES catalogue.

Up next is Pilotwings. I am also playing the new Zelda so the SNES might slow down a bit. Skyward Sword is fun but the graphics are unapologetically awful. Washed out garbage. But so far fun if a little cut scene heavy. (I normally don’t care about graphics but the washed out quality makes it hard to distinguish the world and characters blend in too strongly. Makes me nostalgic for Wind Waker.)

I am getting very nervous about playing all these games. Not because of the time. Not because of the insanity of it. Not because my wife will probably leave me if I keep buying SNES games on eBay (“But we need the box and instructions for Final Fantasy II! Because … it’s  the box … but the box!”).

None of those reasons. I’m afraid the biggest impediment is these games are too god damn hard to play after drinking. It is really slowing me down. Also slowing me down, I might just suck at Pilot Wings.

Dear SimCity,

I tried. I really did. I read online FAQs and figured out your unintuitive game mechanics. I turned my village into a town, built a dangerous number of Nuclear Plants and routinely had outrageous housing prices (this is a classy neighborhood, no riffraff allowed!). But I just don’t like you. You’re boring, everything feels generic and no matter how hard I tried I never felt connected to my city. The natural disasters were amusing maybe enjoyable even.

Now you aren’t a bad game, just not for me. As a parent I see some real value in you. You teach resource management, the importance of building environmentally friendly and that without city planning you end with a clusterfuck of bottlenecks and acres of sprawl (aka the importance of not being Atlanta). The godlike abilities given the player are inspiring and influential. But it’s twenty years later. I know where you go and despite all the cosmetic upgrades I still don’t like you.

You just never feel like a game to me. I never win because stopping at any point is losing. This is a city, it needs to keep evolving and growing and I’m not prepared to play you forever. Sure, you might be just a race to a high score like Tetris but it all just feels pointless because in the end I know you are going to burn.

The best of luck in your future endeavors. I have a feeling you’ll be alright.

Just stay the hell away from me,

Mike

Last night I was making a great run through Gradius III. I had all the Option Drone’s firing ripple lasers across the screen and just annihilating any enemy crazy enough to venture through my territory. I flew through the first three levels without a scratch. And then I died. And then I died again. And again.

I’ve written about my frustration with the punitive death system but I have done a poor job of examining why it exists. First and foremost the game is an arcade port. Arcade games are designed to consume quarters and you can really see the genius of the Gradius design through this lens. Before dying I had multiple power-ups wreaking havoc upon the game world. I should not have died. It was a careless mistake. In the arcade I would pump another quarter in believing my perfect run was right around the corner. This is superb arcade design. The player is always at fault for dying so you always see how the next run will be better.

Second, the limited technology demands a $50 game offer some length of play. The easiest way to do this is through difficulty but Gradius III does one better and demands perfection. After dying I could rarely power my ship back to full strength so starting over and trying for a perfect run is the best way (for me) to try to beat the game.

But I am moving on. I’m still playing SimCity. I have Pilotwings snd F-Zero waiting. I will return to Gradius because it’s damn fun but it reminded me despite my love for them I am not very good at video games. But what Gradius really taught me was why Super Mario World was such an incredible game at it’s release. The game is long, has many, many secrets and true depth to the experience. You can sink your teeth into Mario and that was very rare for games of the SNES generation. We remember the great hits but forget they were few and far between. This is still a generation of arcade games and money-grabbing clones. And I will play them all.

This was all written with a squirmy one-year old on my lap. Sorry, for the typos.