On the plus side, I did manage to squeeze a few hours out of my Saturday to replay the classic Beat-Em-Up Capcom game “Knights of the Round”. I sliced and chopped my way through it and faced the final boss Garibaldi. I have beaten him many times but I never remembered to snap a photo of him. However, this time I managed to do a screen cap and he has been added to the final boss gallery. I am not entirely sure if it warrants a review but I will consider it later on after I complete some other posts (namely the rest of my Captain N posts).

In the meantime, stay tuned, we’re not dead… just resting!

 So here we are in the wonderful late 1980′s and early1990′s, the US Economy is booming thanks to the Technology Explosion (the bubble has not been popped when this show hits). Starbucks is becoming well known for its coffee in major metro areas but is still a far cry from the daily staple it is now. A new generation of latchkey kids has emerged but they are rarely children of a single working parent who can’t be there with them because she works two jobs just to keep the family fed. No, this generation is the kids whose parents are too busy working 12 hour days because they WANT to. By this time, the Nintendo has grabbed hold of the attention of US gamers by the gazillions and a child without an NES is a sad child indeed. Their life is spent dealing with parents who don’t understand why they want to sit in front of a TV and push buttons on a controller instead of going outside to play but the world inside the game is much more interesting to them. In fact, the world is captivating to them! So the amazingly talented marketing team of Nintendo America comes up with a way to fuel the fire. Create a cartoon that fulfills every 90′s boy’s dream – to be sucked into the video game instead of having to clean their room!

The concept is raved about by folks in the USA but Nintendo of Japan is nursing wounds from being beaten up by game developers such as Konami or Capcom because of how the licensing for games and the subsequent royalties of said games are to be disbursed. The end result is that anything Nintendo corporation as a whole owned rights to could be used but although the names of game characters could be used, their actual likeness could not be identical to the likeness included on video games that were not created wholly by Nintendo. The final result… Captain N, the Game Master!

Captain N is actually a cool nickname given to a one, Kevin Keene, who lives in the wealthy suburb of Northridge in Los Angeles, California. He is the essence of the valley boy and looks like he would fit better as a character in Saved By the Bell. However Kevin is a different breed of valley boy. Sure, he might have the letter jacket (evidently from being awesome on the swim team) but he loves video games and has played MORE VIDEO GAMES THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Because of his amazing knack for video games, he is summoned to Videoland, a world where Nintendo characters are very real and a Nintendo Zapper will blast away baddies like it’s nobody’s business. To make him even cooler, his Golden Retreiver Duke gets sucked in too (but Duke has a black circle over his eye when animated and the live version of Duke does not). He is armed with a nintendo game pad on his belt buckle (How’s THAT for a utility belt Batman?) and can do amazing things like pause the world, move at super speeds and various other cool Nintendo things. All while having his trusty dog at his side saving his bacon from time to time.

When Kevin first visits the world, he is greeted by the gorgeous (but rather ditzy) Princess Lana and this is where the character strangeness begins. If you look for Lana in any video game on the NES, she won’t be there. However, she bears a striking resmblence to a more humanized Princess Peach (who was, at this time, only known as Princess Toadstool… so her name COULD have been Lana…) but also has some characteristics similar to Princess Zelda. You see, Peach was already taken by Mario and appeared in the Super Mario Bros. Super Show which aired nearby and on the Friday shows of SMBSS you would get to watch an episode of Zelda instead of Mario brothers so Lana ends up becoming a mashup of every princess cliché known far and wide. She is a weird mixture of Girl Power in and Damsel in Distress with some instances where she appears relentlessly ditzy and can barely take care of herself, much less her kingdom then appearing to be a firm and devoted leader to the people of Videoland at others. As the story progresses, Lana becomes a bit more sure of herself and, as you would expect, falls head over heals for Kevin, the Nintendo game world equivalent of a super knight. This draws much ire from the next character in the good guy gaggle… Simon Belmont.

Now, I don’t know if I played a different game than you did but when I look at Simon in the actual Castlevania games, he looks more like a half dressed barbarian than this guy. I mean… I think THIS Simon belongs in California with Kevin. This is actually intentional because any retro gamer knows that the Castlevania franchise is owned by Konami. So Nintendo was forced to make this Simon ‘similar’ to the one in the games but having to look completely different in order to be legal. In the show he is a darkly tanned, narcissistic, hopeless romantic that is madly in love with Princess Lana. Even though he professes his love for her on countless occasions, she is… of course… completely taken by Captain N. You know how these princesses are, they always want someone who doesn’t live in their country to be their man. Much like the character of the video game, Simon does actually use the trademark leather whip as his character in the game uses but the whip sometimes acts like a character of its own by moving without warning and sometimes wrapping Simon up inside it. Even so, Simon proves his capability with the whip is quite high and saves the day on numerous occasions. He never does get the Princess though. On a few occasions you get to see Simon face his arch-nemesis, Dracula. But I can’t take Drac seriously since he is wearing a bright yellow leisure suit and looks like more like those cardboard cutout vampires you see at Halloween time than the real Dracula… of course, Konami owned rights to their version of Dracula too.

Next up comes Pit, aka Kid Icarus. You will remember this dude from one of the first Nintendo games where he flies about the world shooting baddies with his arrows and eventually saves the entire world from evil. However, the 8-bit representation of this character is much cooler than Pit in the series. Just look at the poor guy! He’s very feminine and wears white Mickey Mouse gloves with sandals and a toga. As if that wasn’t making Pit even less cool than before, the producers of the show decided to make him say “icus” after EVERY sentence. Example: “Holy cow! We have to fight Donkey Kong-icus! That’s impossiblicus!” I can’t make up diaglogue this bad! The conspiracy to make Pit seem like a wussy boy is worsened by the fact that in one particular episode, the crux of the story lies on how unimportant and useless he feels and how he is made to feel better by an arrow maker. Despite his apparent wussiness, Pit can fire some mad arrows at baddies and being able to fly comes in really handy at times.

Rounding out the main good guy group is this guy… No, he’s not some weird Dig Dug character or anything like that. He’s actually… ahem… Megaman. I will pause while you scream “FAIL” at the top of your lungs… done? Good! Any way, this is the single worst example of Nintendo’s licensing issues on characters. The totally awesome blue guy we know and love from the series that now has its own cult following is owned 100% by Capcom. When attempting to create the series, Nintendo wanted to use the blue guy and was harshly told “No”. The Capcom folks would let Megaman appear only if he was completely the opposite of the real Megaman and since he was the epitome of awesome, Megaman in this series is the epitome of loser. He is GREEN instead of blue because the blue version was too similar to the megaman in the games. Also, the real Megaman is about the size of a normal human being in most of the commercial art both past and present so they made this Megaman a dwarf. Yup… he’s…like… 3 feet tall at best. Furthermore, although Megaman had never actually been given a voice in the games to this point and didn’t actually get any kind of voice until around the PS2 and Gameboy Advance era (it was financially and technically impossible in those days) he is usually depicted as sounding something like a young teenager. Not THIS Megaman… nope… he reminds me of the character on South Park who speaks through a cancer harp (hole in the throat) with a very monotone and downright gross sounding voice, I wonder if this character smoked 4 packs of smokes a day while filming the show. Oh… and since Pit has to say ‘-icus’ AFTER everything he says, they make Megaman START everything he says with the words (*cringe*) Mega… In fact, in the opening sequence of the series, the camera pans over Megaworld and you here the starkly monotone words “Mega-Hi!” when we see Megaman. In countless diaglogue, we actually hear Megaman say something like “This is MEGA-bad news!” and Pit responds with “It really is bad-icus!” (I cry). However, despite his horrific voice, Megaman does have the ability to shoot stuff with his gun but due to licensing issues, it is not a gun-arm like we know but rather small projectile shooters (those little diamonds on his glvoes) that shoot his trademark white ball pellet gun. Making an unexpected appearance in the show later on, is a character named Megagirl who is clealry the Captain N variation of Roll. Again, she looks like a dwarf (only pink instead of sea green) but only appears in one episode. Also, Megaman does get other powers throughout the series but unlike the Megaman series of games, he just uses the robot masters’ weapons by throwing them back at them… being able to actually USE those powers would be too close for Capcom to approve.

Halfway through the second season of Captain N, Nintendo was trying desperately to launch their first portable device, the iconic “Gameboy” which was the precursor to a modern Nintendo DS. By this point, every video game playing kid was hooked on watching Captain N every time it was on so why not include the Gameboy? So here he is as a supporting character. But if you watch the episode that this guy first appeared in, you wonder if Nintendo was trying to make the Gameboy UNPOPULAR instead. In his first appearance, the Gameboy almost gets the N Team killed THREE times because he is a raving lunatic. For whatever reason, he was popular enough to keep so he remained but about all I ever saw him do was be a pretty bizzarre surfboard for the team and occasionally work like a ‘super computer’ to do technological things. Even so, I would often choose not to watch episodes which featured him because he was annoying. He also uses a weird high pitched synth-voice which makes it hard to listen to him at all. Thus rounds out our famous N Team! Of course, other NES staples such as Dr. Right (Light), and even the cool Bayou Billy from the under-appreciated NES game “The Adventures of Bayou Billy” with Link from Zelda appearing (after the SMBSS/Zelda block was not as popular).

With all these Good Guys around, what about the enemies? Who are they fighting? And… what did I think of the show? Well, I shall post follow ups to describe those things.

TO BE CONTINUED…

In the meantime, I have been watching “Captain N: The Game Master” on my full series DVD collection. You can bet your Nintendo Zapper that I will be posting about it next. So please be patient as I finish up class work and prepare for a brief break.

Ta ta for now!

Platform games had become a staple of the SNES culture as they drew the attention of both newbies to the system and captured a niche market for the gamer who wanted to scour through levels upon levels of platforms, sometimes jumping off a cliff as they attempt to jump to what might be a secret platform in hopes of finding EVERY secret and reaping the rewards of getting ‘The Best Ending’ and bragging rights among their friends for being the first one to do so. Yet as the games became popular, they also became saturated in the market and one could almost guess that if they picked up a game from the now large array of SNES games in that section of their favorite movie/game store (yes, they used to be the rage) that they had a 50% chance of the game being a platformer, a 25% chance of it being an RPG, and a 25% chance of it being something that did not fit into any particular category. The platform genre for SNES  featured such heavy hitters as Super Mario World, Aladdin of the Disney fame, and Bubsy which was famed to be the next Sonic the Hedgehog (a lofty title it never attained).

Into this mixture enters the seasoned, yet often unknown Pickford Brothers,  Jon and Ste, who had created many games for everything from Atari to the IBM PC but rarely ever got their names includes in any of the credits. They wanted to release a game that was creative, unique, fun, and rather challenging. After discussing a strange world they had both dreamed up, they decided to create a map for “Akrillic” which was in the region of “Polyesta” (are you picking up on the theme here?). After some more concept work, the Pickford Bros. created Plok and it is one of their most commercially successful video games the two were credited directly on.

Your character, Plok, looks much like a Play-Doh experiment with 4 floating appendeges (similar to what a Mii looks like on the Wii). In the course of the game, you battle through the world of Akrillic beating up such unique things as the giant mouths with tuxedos known as the Bobbins Brothers, annoying and disgusting creatures known as Fleas that have infested the land, and many other strange monsters. What is unique is HOW you do so. You throw your arms and legs at your enemies (Ro-KE-to-PUNCH!) often in a succession, leaving Plok as nothing more than an immobile lump of clay while you wait for your appendeges to return.  Sometimes Plok must sacrifice one of his appendeges for a set period of time by punching or kicking at a ‘hanger’ switch which will retain your limb until you either complete a nearby task or until you make it to the end of the current level and on one or two occasions you actually have to fight a boss with less than your full array of limbs.

But don’t think you are limited to this option, what good would a platformer be if you did not have a few cool powerups? Scattered through the world are several “suits” that Plok will change into (in a humerous scene where he changes behind a curtain in the middle of the level) for power complete with specialized music for each suit. You can pick up the blunderbuss which changes Plok into an outfit Sherlock Holmes would be proud of and allows him to repeatedly shoot a blunderbuss with buckshot. Also, there is a flamethrower powerup which lets you blast gouts of huge flames at your foes as well as awesome boxing gear for much stronger punches, a badass rocket launcher suit and even twin pistols with a cowboy hat. This is a wonderful change from the duo-tone, rather undetailed primary sprite that is Plok. Did I mention the music?… oh the music!

Did you think it was over there? No! Not at all! If you really have the time to try and get to all kinds of odd and hard to reach places in the levels, you will find several “Presents” which Plok can use either for the level or for the entire game that make the going much easier including such things as the Buzzsaw jump among others. Furthermore, as you get deeper into the Brendammi Bog, the place where all Fleas come from, you will find that Plok gets to use all kinds of awesome vehicles to get through the levels here including a motorcycle, a jet bike and many others. You finally descend into the Flea Pit and beat the disgustingly cute “Flea Queen” and rid the land of Akrillic from Fleas forevermore!

This game is really a fantasic game with a breath of fresh air for when platform games are getting old and annoying. However, don’t expect the game to be easy. In fact, one of the biggest complaints the Pickford Bros received was that the game was too hard for the average gamer. I say NAY! Sure, you might have to devote several hours of time to getting all the secrets but the game’s universe is so quirky, strange, and fun that you won’t consider it a chore. Not to mention, the game features a much better music than a majority of the other platformers of the era and some of its most popular tunes from the score such as “Creepy Crag” and “The Flea Pit” live on as Overclocked.org remixes. Can’t get much more famous than that, can you? So clear out a few hours a night, fire up your emulator and give this cool platformer a go, you will be thankful that you did!

The game started life as an arcade game and soon found its way to all of the consoles in the console wars of the 90′s. The most widely played version was the Nintendo version and it was this version that I played initially. However, based on the reviews I have read and my own experience, the Turbo Grafx-16 version was the version that was most like the arcade as far as video and audio quality are concerned. It is for this reason that one of my recent purchases on the Wii Virtual Console was the TGx16 version.

The game is designed much like the flying shooter games that made arcade gaming so popular such as Space Invaders and the original Gradius. however, the concept is made different because your character is a dragon not a spaceship and you shoot fireballs not lasers. Power ups include multiple heads (up to three) and different “color” as well as several upgrades to increase your firepower. The green dragon power up is very fast (smaller) and has crazy strong fireballs. The pink dragon is invincible for a short time (like the Star power up in the Mario series). The white dragon is the ultimate in firepower, the flying rail gun – if you have all three heads then he will shoot 3 fireballs at a time out of both right and left heads and will fire 5 fireballs at a time out of his center head… that means 11 shots at once! You also get power ups such as extra “hearts” to take more damage and fire power-ups to allow you to slowly become a flying machine gun.

Now comes the purpose of the title of this entry. So what’s the big deal about the game? It is HIGHLY addictive. Anyone who has ever had a desire to fly will like the concept of soaring over the skies as a dragon, you will further enjoy the dragon aspect if you like Dragons, Knights, and so on. For someone who loves fantasy like me, this was a dead on choice and it just so happened that you have the chivalrous aspect of saving the princess as every good guy should.

However, you will quickly find that as addictive as the game is, it is painfully difficult even on the easiest setting (only available on the NES version). Even with only one head, you are the biggest thing on the screen (aside from bosses) and with three heads, you can imagine how much easier you are to hit when everything around you is shooting at you. To add insult to injury, some enemies explode when hit, some of them are on the ground which requires you to fire a ground bomb at just the right angle and location to destroy them. If that wasn’t enough, the terrain requires you to move all about or run into a rock or other obstacle and be caught by the ‘forward scroll’ of the game. Luckily, you have a series of continues that act like “1-Ups” and allow you to start back where you left off when (trust me, “if” does not fit, it WILL happen) you die. However, you only get 2 of these from the beginning and you can only increase this as you get deeper into the game. Suffice to say, you often use all your continues within the first two stages if you aren’t practiced in the game.

Your dragon battles his way through 8 stages with the final two stages battling through the palace of Zawell the Hades Serpent to face him and save the princess. If you can manage to take on the evil Hades Serpent and kill him, you will transform back to a human and accomplish what every heroic knight could want, marriage to the princess and the rights to be king of the land. Check this game out but be prepared to devote hours upon hours to battling your way through mountains, lava fields, jungles, frozen tundra, and other wonderful terrain. It may take some work but you will find that the reward of the end scenes is well worth it for the retro gamer!

Game cover of Super Mario Paint

I feel it is only fitting to begin my trek down memory lane with a look at Good Old “Mario Paint” composer since it was one of the first inspirations for this blog. The game itself actually had many pieces you could chose from. There was a PaintBrush like application where you could draw pictures and save them and then later on edit them. It also had a unique animation studio that, although quirky, was far too complicated for the average player and light years ahead of its time. Another fun option was the “Coffee Break” which was a strange game in which your cursor was a hand with a flyswatter and you would swat ‘gnats’ which made a humerous “ung” sound when killed and sometimes you faced a ‘boss’ gnat that was much harder and more dangerous.

But nothing else was quite as unique and fun as the “Composer” software. This part of the game was so exciting and interesting that it lives on as a flash download from UnFun Games and allows you to make complex music files and even arrange different songs together. A feature unheard of in the original game. This application and the game for that matter, received a revival in recent years and led to a stream of YouTube videos with Mario Paint renditions of such songs as “Through Fire and Flames” by Dragonforce, “What Is Love” by Haddaway. Just search on YouTube for the song and include “Mario Composer” as part of the search.

Thanks to an interest sparked by looking at Mario Paint, I found my way to another awesome software called MuseScore that lets you create music by placing real notes on a real clef. It’s also free! So if you have a desire in your heart to be a muiscal master, grab an emulator and play with Mario Paint or go grab the MarioPaint Composer from UnFun. Happy MIDI’ng!

Seriously though, this place will be hopping soon, it just takes some time! Your patience is greatly appreciated.