Our picks for the absolute best — and absolute worst — titles included in the dedicated console playlist
Ranking All 42 Games on the Sega Genesis Mini Console!
Showing posts with label Genesis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Genesis. Show all posts
Sunday, January 19, 2020
Wednesday, July 3, 2019
A Tribute to USHRA Monster Wars!
What better way to celebrate America’s birthday than with a Saturday morning TV show that tried to turn monster truckin’ into pro wrestling?
Monday, July 1, 2019
The Ten Greatest Spider-Man Video Games of All-Time!
From the 2600 to the PlayStation4, we count down Old Webhead’s greatest forays into the interactive medium!
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
An All-American Tribute to MERCS!
Looking for a most-excellent way to celebrate July the Fourth? There may not be a more American way to honor the holiday than firing up this nearly 30-year-old Capcom arcade killfest ... and here's the proof.
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX
Although it may seem odd to celebrate America's founding by paying homage to a nearly 30-year-old video game designed by the Japs, if you've ever actually played Mercs, you already know the classic Capcom coin-op is pretty much the most American thing ever invented that isn't actually American.
Do you think all of those Japanese game designers in the 1980s secretly wanted to be Americans just like you and me? Go ahead, take a gander at the panoply of arcade classics - Final Fight, Contra, Double Dragon, Rush'n Attack ... all games where the main character wasn't some pencil thin rice eater, but some musclebound, wide-eyed Caucasoid-American death machine. For fuck's sake, those programmers admired the Americans so much that when it came time to make a game about the Battle of Midway, they chose to let you play as the people who royally fucked up Japan instead of the people who were trying to defend it.
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| So even in the heat of battle, you're never too far away from Fred Flintstone food. |
Mercs was one of those games that kinda sorta fell through the cracks back in the day. It came out in that weird coin-op dead zone period between Final Fight and Street Fighter II, and since Robotron and Smash TV style kill-a-thons were starting to get passe, I suppose it makes sense that it was relatively forgotten by retro gaming enthusiasts. Although I played it and enjoyed it quite a few times in my youth, I really couldn't appreciate the game for its instant gratification genius until recently. Not only is this one of the greatest top-down arcade shooters ever, it might just be THE BEST top-down arcade shooter ever ... and trust me, that is some lofty praise, indeed.
There aren't a whole lot of retro arcade games I find myself emulating repeatedly, but Mercs, for whatever reason, is one of those rare titles I just have to play through a couple of times a year. Barely 20 minutes long, the game is perfect for pick-up and play, blast-the-shit-out-of-everything fun, and I can't tell you how many times I've killed time waiting for emails and virtual conferences to start by plowing through Mercs as fast as humanly possible. I'm hesitant to declare anything truly timeless, but if the game remains just as ass-kicking a quarter century down the road as it did when it was brand new, I reckon that's pretty dadgum close to being timeless, ain't it?
Let's start with the basics. Mercs is a game that allows up to three players simultaneously (and yes, each character has a different canonical name, but like you really give a fuck.) You've got one joystick with eight-way movement, one button that shoots and one button that detonates a screen-clearing bomb. And that, kids, is all there is to it. Each stage is littered with enemies, bullets and tons of shit that can be exploded real good. Pretty much everything in the game - from walls to crates to bamboo huts to enemy vehicles - can go boom, and the designers of the title have given you four distinct tools of mass destruction to tinker around with:
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| This is actually the game's idea of taking it easy on you. |
The Shotgun - don't ask me why, but instead of firing buckshot, it fears big fat globs of green plasma. It's not as fast as the assault rifle, but its bullets cover a wider area. Good for up-close combat.
The Flamethrower - hold down the "fire" button and you basically turn into an unstoppable death machine. This weapon incinerates all the enemies you encounter, but it doesn't really provide solid cover for your foes' bullets. A good offensive weapon, but it certainly leaves you vulnerable to attacks from the flank.
The Grenade Launcher - basically it fires fast, fat ass missiles. It's faster than the shotgun and does more damage than the assault rifle, but the timing between bullets sometimes leaves you open for a frontal attack. Great for taking down huge vehicles, but not the best for one-on-one firefights.
Throughout the game you can also pick up more smart bombs, and trust me, you will be needing as many of these fuckers as you can get your hands on. Pretty much every boss you encounter needs at least one hit from a smart bomb before you can bump it off, and there's usually at least one or two super heavy duty firefights in each stage before the boss fight where you will have to use up your precious explosives just to save your own rear-end. Thankfully, the game is pretty liberal with the power-ups, with ample cans of spinach and hamburgers all over the place to refill your health. You can also pick up some medals scattered about the playing field, too, but that's only to bump up your high score. And since this is a '90s game, like you give a shit about getting the high score on anything ... you just want to watch shit GO BOOM and GO BOOM often.
This game throws you into the thick of the action from the very first second of stage one. Literally the moment your character pops up there's already a billion dudes on screen trying to shoot your ass, and of course, there are ample power-ups scattered around the bamboo huts to even the odds. Following a rock slide, you cross a bridge and come nose-to-nose with the game's first boss enemy - an attack helicopter. Still have those insta-kill bombs? Good, because you're going to need them. Oddly enough, the entire level can be completed in less than a minute. That may seem like shitty game design at first, but just you wait - Capcom clearly wanted to lull you into a false sense of security, and good God almighty, do they ever crank shit up to 11 in stage 2.
The second level begins in sort of a Bavarian-looking village. You get ambushed by some dudes in a Jeep, but wait a minute, what is this little development? That's right, amigos, 11 years before Halo THIS GAME gave you the ability to commandeer enemy weapons and blow da' fuck outta' everything you encounter. Of course, your ride won't last too long, since you're about to find yourself knee-deep in a battlefield glutted with tanks and snipers on patrol towers. So yeah, you pretty much have to use your bombs to escape, and once you do, it's time for a boss battle against an EVEN BIGGER TANK. At this point, even the most hardcore of gamers have already dumped about six quarters into the machine, and trust me, there's going to be a whole hell of a lot more coinage getting plunked in stage 3.
Interestingly, every stage in the game is twice as long as the one before it. Here, you make your way aboard a naval destroyer, complete with stationary turrets you can man to kill, kill and then kill some more. After monkeying around on some moving platforms, you have a boss fight with a huge ass fighter jet that takes roughly 41,000 shots to kill. Odds are, you're going to die five or six times before you finish off this fucker, so you better have that change purse preemptively pried open.
Stage four starts off in a lagoon, and here you finally get to play around with the flamethrower ( and take it from a retro gaming pro - incinerating foes with this sucker is every bit as enjoyable as charging up the Blue Bomber's arm cannon in Mega Man 4 and blasting a Volvo-sized hole in whatever Robo-Fucker had the misfortune of standing in your way.) There's a new vehicle introduced (a boat) and the final boss fight is against, well, an even bigger boat that has an impossible number of guns on it. Estimated number of quarters you will need to vanquish it: four dollars' worth.
Stage five takes you back to the Bavarian village, but now YOU are the one that gets to operate a huge freakin' tank (at one point, you even engage in a tank on tank dogfight, which yeah, I figger is scientifically impossible for the human player to win.) Thankfully, there are ample opportunities to jack some Jeeps later on, and you won't have to wait too long to get your flamethrower back. After dodging some technically impossible to dodge landmines, you're asked to blow up a wall and enter a mysterious elevator shaft, which - naturally - puts you on a railroad to do battle with a giant train end-boss that is literally made up of nothing but impossibly huge guns. Jeez - you think the bad guys in this game are trying to cover up for some genetic shortcomings or something?
In stage six, you begin by breaking into the enemy stronghold (oddly enough, the game never tells you the nationality of the bad guys, so I'm just going to take a wild guess and assume it's the Germans fucking things up, like always.) You take a trolley ride where you have to blow up these giant robotic tendrils, then you go down a couple of corridors (almost all of which are metal grated bridges hovering over bottomless pits) and blast holes in walls and make a whole lot of dudes die. Then you blow up some more tanks and fighter jets and then you have another boss fight against a giant gun with about seventy smaller guns welded onto it. Yeah, it may be a little redundant, but come on - there's only so much originality you expect out of an early '90s 2D shooter, isn't there?
After that we get a bulletin saying the leader of the Revolutionary Corps. has taken the "former President" hostage in an attempt to flee the country. What does that mean for you, Joe Q. Button Masher? Well, it means we've got ourselves one more boss battle, this time against a giant plane that spans about three full screens and has about 100 different turrets on it. After making it go kablooey, we get a cutscene in which all three color-coded Mercs rescue the former prez (he's white, thin and grey-headed, so maybe he's a stand-in for Ronnie Reagan), and then the screen fades to sepia as text crawls letting us know that while the former POTUS is safe and sound, no official information on the Mercs' top-secret mission was ever published. Then it's time to roll the end credits, as the silhouettes of our three heroes on Jeeps cruise across a giant, Grand Canyon-like background on a loop (which, from my perspective, may be meant to depict the mountains of Afghanistan, but I could be wrong) while oddly soothing music plays in the background. And that, lads and lasses, is all she wrote.
So yeah, you can blast through Mercs in about 20 minutes, but that's hardly a slight against the game. Even now, I consider it one of the best top down 2D shooters of all-time; in fact, I'd put it neck and neck with the supremely underrated Guerrilla War as the frontrunners for the best two-dimensional, God's-eye-view shoot-a-thons ever.
Even now I can't really put a finger on what exactly makes Mercs so awesome. Maybe it's the non-stop action, or maybe it's the bare-bones, ultra-twitch gameplay. Either way, it's a game that totally outdoes Robotron, Smash TV and Total Carnage in the two-dimensional blast-a-rama department, and if you haven't played it, for goddamn, motherfuckin' shame.
Beyond the arcade iteration, Mercs was ported to the Sega Genesis, but for some reason, it lost the co-op mode. That said, it's still a damn fine shrunken down version of the game made a million times more awesome by the inclusion of an all new "mission" mode which, effectively, represents a full-fledged, totally all-new, built-from-the-ground-up game. The version that made it to the Master System, however, is pretty disappointing, with crappy sprites and really unwieldy controls. Still, it's probably worth playing through at least once, maybe even twice if you're on some really good drugs. And I'd probably be remiss if I didn't bring up the 2008 Xbox Live spiritual sequel Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3, which I've never played but judging from the videos on YouTube, looks decent enough, I suppose.
So here, on the birthday of America (and by proxy, the de facto birthday of freedom, liberty and the right to be as fat as you want), I honestly can't think of a more fitting way to celebrate the Fourth than by cramming a grilled tofu dog down your gullet (with the extra spicy golden mustard, of course), cracking open an ice cold off-brand soda and blasting through Mercs as fast as humanly possible, preferably while Manowar's version of "An American Trilogy" blares at full volume in the background.
Which, come to think of it, might just be the best way to celebrate ALL holidays moving forward, in my humblest o' opinions...
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| Oh, the irony of napalming some motherfuckers in the middle of a lake... |
Interestingly, every stage in the game is twice as long as the one before it. Here, you make your way aboard a naval destroyer, complete with stationary turrets you can man to kill, kill and then kill some more. After monkeying around on some moving platforms, you have a boss fight with a huge ass fighter jet that takes roughly 41,000 shots to kill. Odds are, you're going to die five or six times before you finish off this fucker, so you better have that change purse preemptively pried open.
Stage four starts off in a lagoon, and here you finally get to play around with the flamethrower ( and take it from a retro gaming pro - incinerating foes with this sucker is every bit as enjoyable as charging up the Blue Bomber's arm cannon in Mega Man 4 and blasting a Volvo-sized hole in whatever Robo-Fucker had the misfortune of standing in your way.) There's a new vehicle introduced (a boat) and the final boss fight is against, well, an even bigger boat that has an impossible number of guns on it. Estimated number of quarters you will need to vanquish it: four dollars' worth.
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| One of the less intense moments from Mercs. |
In stage six, you begin by breaking into the enemy stronghold (oddly enough, the game never tells you the nationality of the bad guys, so I'm just going to take a wild guess and assume it's the Germans fucking things up, like always.) You take a trolley ride where you have to blow up these giant robotic tendrils, then you go down a couple of corridors (almost all of which are metal grated bridges hovering over bottomless pits) and blast holes in walls and make a whole lot of dudes die. Then you blow up some more tanks and fighter jets and then you have another boss fight against a giant gun with about seventy smaller guns welded onto it. Yeah, it may be a little redundant, but come on - there's only so much originality you expect out of an early '90s 2D shooter, isn't there?
After that we get a bulletin saying the leader of the Revolutionary Corps. has taken the "former President" hostage in an attempt to flee the country. What does that mean for you, Joe Q. Button Masher? Well, it means we've got ourselves one more boss battle, this time against a giant plane that spans about three full screens and has about 100 different turrets on it. After making it go kablooey, we get a cutscene in which all three color-coded Mercs rescue the former prez (he's white, thin and grey-headed, so maybe he's a stand-in for Ronnie Reagan), and then the screen fades to sepia as text crawls letting us know that while the former POTUS is safe and sound, no official information on the Mercs' top-secret mission was ever published. Then it's time to roll the end credits, as the silhouettes of our three heroes on Jeeps cruise across a giant, Grand Canyon-like background on a loop (which, from my perspective, may be meant to depict the mountains of Afghanistan, but I could be wrong) while oddly soothing music plays in the background. And that, lads and lasses, is all she wrote.
So yeah, you can blast through Mercs in about 20 minutes, but that's hardly a slight against the game. Even now, I consider it one of the best top down 2D shooters of all-time; in fact, I'd put it neck and neck with the supremely underrated Guerrilla War as the frontrunners for the best two-dimensional, God's-eye-view shoot-a-thons ever.
Even now I can't really put a finger on what exactly makes Mercs so awesome. Maybe it's the non-stop action, or maybe it's the bare-bones, ultra-twitch gameplay. Either way, it's a game that totally outdoes Robotron, Smash TV and Total Carnage in the two-dimensional blast-a-rama department, and if you haven't played it, for goddamn, motherfuckin' shame.
Beyond the arcade iteration, Mercs was ported to the Sega Genesis, but for some reason, it lost the co-op mode. That said, it's still a damn fine shrunken down version of the game made a million times more awesome by the inclusion of an all new "mission" mode which, effectively, represents a full-fledged, totally all-new, built-from-the-ground-up game. The version that made it to the Master System, however, is pretty disappointing, with crappy sprites and really unwieldy controls. Still, it's probably worth playing through at least once, maybe even twice if you're on some really good drugs. And I'd probably be remiss if I didn't bring up the 2008 Xbox Live spiritual sequel Wolf of the Battlefield: Commando 3, which I've never played but judging from the videos on YouTube, looks decent enough, I suppose.
So here, on the birthday of America (and by proxy, the de facto birthday of freedom, liberty and the right to be as fat as you want), I honestly can't think of a more fitting way to celebrate the Fourth than by cramming a grilled tofu dog down your gullet (with the extra spicy golden mustard, of course), cracking open an ice cold off-brand soda and blasting through Mercs as fast as humanly possible, preferably while Manowar's version of "An American Trilogy" blares at full volume in the background.
Which, come to think of it, might just be the best way to celebrate ALL holidays moving forward, in my humblest o' opinions...
Thursday, June 1, 2017
Sega's Infamous "Absolutely Rose Street" Infomercial!
Back in 1994, Sega decided one of the best ways to advertise their new 32X add-on was to create a fictitious soap opera about 20-somethings butting heads with a public-access TV producer who hates video games. Surprisingly, the gimmick didn't do a whole hell of a lot to move units...
By: Jimbo X
Now, all you motherfuckers know I love me some Sega, but even I have to admit they did a LOT of fucking up in the 1990s. Rolling out the Sega CD way too early, manufacturing pointless hardware like the Pico and Nomad, forgetting to tell retailers they were releasing the Sega Saturn, not putting a DVD player in the Dreamcast, letting a partnership that would have effectively given Sega the rights to the Playstation fall apart - considering all of those monumental screw-ups, it's actually kinda' surprising Sega didn't go belly up as a console maker than they already did.
In the rich panoply of Sega hardware fuck-ups, though, perhaps the 32X represents their quintessential console misstep. Even now, I'm not entirely sure why the thing was green lit; after all, it was released just months before the 32-bit Saturn console hit store shelves, and with a grand total of about 30 games in its library, pretty much nobody anywhere had much of an incentive to purchase it. I kinda' sorta' get the idea that it was meant to beef up the Genesis and keep people playing their 16-bit powerhouse while waiting for the Saturn's release, but jeez - was even that worth squandering millions - maybe even hundreds of millions - on a product with a barely eight-month life cycle?
Not that I consider the 32X to be a terrible console. In fact, it actually had some really good (and some bordering on legitimately great) titles. Still, considering how crappy Sega's advertising for the console was, in hindsight it's no surprise why nobody seemed to have gotten excited about it. Spend another $160 to play a slightly less shitty version of Doom and Virtua Fighter? No thanks, I'd rather teach my pet hamster to swallow $20 bills whole.
And perhaps nothing shows the ineptness and cluelessness of Sega's marketing brass more than the mystifying squandering of cash that was Absolutely Rose Street. Never heard of it? Well, that's probably for a good reason; because it was a half hour long infomercial that aired only a couple of times in 1994 at like 3 in the morning on The Golf Channel. That somebody out there actually recorded this thing for the sake of posterity is pretty much a miracle in and of itself - and, in my eyes, prolly the greatest evidence of a higher power anybody can ever drudge up.
It's pretty much impossible to sum up what Absolutely Rose Street was in one sentence without making it sound like the ramblings of a peyote addict, so just bear with me, kids. You need the full picture to grasp this one, and trust me - this is a trip down memory lane I guarantee you won't regret.
The presentation begins with a huge-boobed blonde woman wearing dark red lipstick with a nasally voice like Harley Quinn's saying the following infomercial is a paid advertisement from Sega, although she thinks it should've been her show, Stylin' With Stella, instead. We get a bunch of rapid, MTV-style flash cuts of surfers, skaters and dudes just hanging out by the beach juxtaposed with gameplay of Virtua Racing Deluxe and Doom. Then, for some reason, we get a REAL Environmental Protection Agency P.S.A. with a whole bunch of nature shots and tips on recycling paired with a proper 32x commercial showing a guy going to a carnival, getting knocked out, having visions of the Sega CD and waking up in a hay pile beside a bearded man dressed like a woman. So, yeah, they actually put commercials inside their infomercials, because - hell, I have nary the foggiest idea. So we get these two guys sitting in a room (who sound just like a bunch of guidos from Goodfellas) and they strategically shut off a TV right before some broad says the word "Nintendo." The executive tells the producer he wants them to produce a show pandering to the video game playing demographic and the producer says video gamers are all a bunch of losers whose brains have turned to mush (man, what a way to celebrate your target audience, huh?) We learn the producer's name is Joe Whitehead, and he visits the crew behind Game Beat, some indie local access TV show and holy shit, there's a Dreamcast logo spraypainted on the wall because sometimes, predictive programming is real.
Joe wastes no time before berating the crew, stating "headline, your show sucks." He says they need to radically overhaul the program or they're cancelled. By the way, if you want 1990s enforced-multiculturalism at its best, you can't beat the Game Beat cast, which includes a white dude, a black dude, an Asian dude and a kinda Hispanic looking token gamer girl. They ask Joe for a higher budget and new equipment and he describes video games as "the bing, the bong, he's up, he's down, he's in and out" and there is NO WAY to make that interesting. He also insults one of the kids by sarcastically calling him "a genius" and saying he bets he plays video games - then the cast hangs out by the beach during sunset while sad, grunge ballad music plays.
The Asian kid says he will have to go back to his job at Radio Shack, while the white guys say's his dad will tell him he should've gone to school instead. The white guy and the maybe Mexican chick walk down a side alley (at a slanted angle, of course) and she asks him what he thinks the biggest news in gaming is these days. She says Doom and the guy make a joke about everything being doom with her. Then, she says the greatest line I have ever heard: "Doom is coming to video games" (which, for those of you who need some retard script translated into English, means "Doom is being ported from the P.C. to home consoles."
So she talks about the new 32X being a "power charger" for the Genesis. She claims it can make the Genesis go "40 times faster," while the dude thinks it's all marketing hype (holy hell, why would they even hint at that in their own advertisement?) Regardless, the girl (who does remarkably look like a 20-something Tara Tainton) thinks the matter should be investigated further and circles some video game magazine copy about the 32X while the rest of the crew (wearing the most 90s-ish clothing you could imagine) hit the streets to interview teens about Sega's latest and greatest hardware.
Some talk about their fears of the "Sega or the Genesis" becoming obsolete. I'd like to say they are obviously plants, but at least paid plants would be able to properly name the systems they are talking about. Then the white dude wearing a shirt that just says "radio" on it starts doing this thing where he goes "heh, heh" while snapping his neck in and out like turtle. For absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The girl then sends a really passive aggressive instant message to Sega's media point person and when she hits the send button, her CRT monitor EXPLODES with a mini 32X commercial. Then it's time for an Incredible Crash Test Dummies commercial (man, how weird was it to hear Garfield's voice coming out of a fatal car crash victim?) and a Sega Game Gear ad where a fat retard hits himself in the head with a dead squirrel so his Game Boy will show more than two colors. The announcer trumpets games like "the new Ecco and Mortal 2" but all I can think about is how they were able to not only use in-game footage of Super Mario Land 2 in their commercial, but even the music from its soundtrack. Not that it's that effective of an ad to begin with - shit, I did a top 50 Game Gear games of all-time countdown and I can safely say SML2 is way better than anything Sega put out on its handheld.
At this point, a graphic pops up on screen asking you to vote for the show you would rather see: Game Beat or Stylin' with Stella. Then the girl gamer meets Sega representative "Brad Granger" and the dude who designed Tomcat Alley in a warehouse and they tell her everything she saw in his email was confidential. Then they tell her about Midnight Raiders and how the 32X boosts the graphics and sound of live-action Sega CD games ... somehow. Brad and the chick exchange Shakespeare quotes in front of a giant Sonic and Knuckles cardboard cutout and the sexual tension is REAL, ya'll. She brings up Surgical Strike and Wirehead on the Sega CD and Virtua Racing, Doom and Eternal Champions (which never actually was released) on the 32x. She says she NEEDS to play and review these games because people are afraid they will make the Genesis and Sega CD obsolete and they finally cave in and agree to show her come software.
Cut to the rest of the nerds interviewing AMERICAN MCGEE in an arcade in front of an old school Outrun machine. He's wearing a Doom shirt and says practically nothing has been lost in the translation from the PC to the 32X and the graphics, sound and speed will be virtually identical. Well folks, there you have it - the greatest lie ever perpetrated against mankind. Also, he says you don't want to know what his dreams are like and the white guy cackles like a maniacal retard.
Now the chick is in a dark warehouse nook wearing a belly shirt and this feels so much like a mid-1990s softcore Showtime porno that I already have a boner. She shows off a 32X and a demo of Virtua Racing Deluxe (which, to be fair, is actually a really, really great port that's better than even the Saturn version.) Then we get a montage of them pretending to play the game and acting like 'tards while gameplay clips play over the picture-in-picture nonsense. They show the footage to Joe and he says he ain't impressed and that games are just "a phase" like the Hula hoop. The gang goes back to their warehouse studio thing and the black guy says he hopes Joe dies "a slow, slow painful death." I just noticed, the white guy kinda looks a little like Frank Mir. He says he has "every reason to be pissed" because his show got shit-canned and he thinks his girl is boning a 32X programmer. Then the black guy says "ego is the devil" and the kinda' white kids (who are probably dating, although it's never explicitly confirmed) chit chat for a bit. The guy apologizes for being a jerk earlier and she (wearing a skin-tight silver spandex shirt and coveralls) says to focus on finishing the show because revenge is a dish best served cold.
A telephone number flashes on the screen. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it was a hotline back in 1994 were you could vote on whether or not you liked Game Beat more than Stella's show. Because man, was that the kind of thing Sega really should've been spending its money on. So, Joe meets Stella backstage and they conspire to give her show the old Game Beat time slot and she smooches him and smears blood red lipstick all over his face. Now it's time for an anti-drug commercial with a dealer going to a basketball court and a fat black kid saying he doesn't need drugs because he needs to graduate and laugh and have a good life, but most of all, because he needs his punk dealer ass to leave the area right then and there. Then we get a fake commercial for Stella's show. She's wearing a sparkly red dress and her hair is up in a bun thingy and the show's logo is written in lipstick on a mirror behind her. Then we get a BIZARRE Genesis commercial in black and white with a surfer guy going to a morgue and being shown a competing console (I think it's supposed to be the SNES, but it looks way too blocky underneath the sheet) and everybody recoils when they show its remains offscreen. The commercial announcer says you can always add the 32X and Sega CD to your Genesis and footage of Jurassic Park and one of the later Joe Montana football games rolls. The ad concludes with the kid asking the mortician to burn the unnamed console, because nothing says "hardware sales" quite like creeping your customers the fuck out.
Now we get to watch the newest episode of Game Beat with Kristen Savage and Max Jackson. Yeah, those fuckos have actual names, but eh, like you or anybody else cares. So they walk around this "underground party" on Absolutely Rose Street holding mics and asking people random ass questions about the 32X. He's wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off like Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons while she's wearing a shimmery gold dress and dark brown lipstick (man, do I miss that look.) They talk about the heavily hyped 32X unit and wonder if it's' worth the hype or just media buzz (again, why in the fuck would Sega put doubt inside the heads of consumers in one of their own commercials?) Despite the white guy saying "Sega is the king of 16-bit," he's skeptical about the new hardware, ay one point asking if Sega "shot themselves in the foot" with the console add-on. And that, kids, is the definition of a "self-fulfilling prophecy."
Max shows you how to put a 32X in your Genesis, list its $160 MSRP and lets you know you can STILL play your Genesis games through it. He says he gives the 32X "two fists up" while footage of Virtua Racing on a CRT atop a column plays. Get it, because of Columns and shit? Eh, that's probably giving the people who made this turd way too much credit.
We get a few seconds of the new Star Wars game and Savage says "all you Doomers" can be happy because Doom is on the 32X and it's "faster than a 486" and it's "going to put you in interstellar hell." Then Max holds a random CD-ROM and says the 32X is going to turbo boost your Sega CD games. The only problem, though, is that they don't actually have any live-action CD games to show off yet, so here area few cuts scenes from Midnight Raiders, Wirehead and Fahrenheit (the firefighting sim!) to tide you over. "What have video games gotten to?" Savage remarks. "Now we're saving people instead of killing them?"
Savage rhetorically asks whether the Genesis is dead and he keeps doing a Dr. Frankenstein impersonation saying "it's alive" over and over again while pointing at the 32X. To show the Genesis ain't dead yet, we get footage of NFL '95 and Sonic and Knuckles, complete with a demonstration of its much ballyhooed lock-on technology.
Good lord, this is the greatest parody of X-Play ever, except it came out a decade before X-Play was even on TV. Oh, there's also the new Eternal Champions game on the Sega CD, which is marketed as having the bloodiest deaths ever in a video game. Funny how they censor one of the fatalities, but don't bother blurring out the after-effects of said fatality with the bloody corpse fragments splattered all over the stage. Then the sorta' white girl busts the definitely white guy's balls by saying it's for mature audiences only so he can't play it.
She preps "Brad Granger" for an incognito meeting with Joe at the studio. He leaves a copy of Game Beat in a huge video box with the name of Stella's show written on the label. Joe and Stella (wearing a blue evening gown and looking like a way hotter version of Elizabeth Banks) are watching her show on TV, but just moments into the program it is interrupted by Game Beat. The next day Joe is called into the producer's office and he tries to explain what happened but the producer tells him he loved the show and the sponsors thought it was great. He tells him they want 26 more episodes produced and that they loved the joke "about the bimbo." We cut to the Game Beat crew hanging out on the beach discussing ideas for the next episode. The girl proposes "virtual reality theme parks in Japan" and mull ways they can bilk Joe out of money to send them on a paid vacation. Max thanks Brad (who now is rocking a Hawaiian shirt with his hair shagged out) for helping them put the show together. Then Joe gets on his knees and begs Stella to forgive him (if she cut her nails, she could play games, too, he tells her) and then she hits him with her purse and he screams "Sega!" because you'd expect him to scream "Stella!" because that's a reference to a preexisting work of some kind.
We cut to Stella taking phone calls while the phone number from earlier flashes on the screen. She thanks a caller for voting for her show and then she berates another caller for voting for Game Beat. We get one more paid advertisement notice from Sega and learn that Game Beat and Absolutely Rose Street are copyright protected by some non-Sega firm and - mercifully - that is all she wrote.
Well, I guess that pretty much speaks for itself, don't it? For those of you wanting more insight into the program, there's not a whole lot of info out there on the Intrawebs. Per some Sega wikis, the infomercial aired on Comedy Central, MTV and ESPN2 in November and December 1994, and believe it or not, it was actually promoted by a few Sega-backed magazines back in the day. While there is an IMDB page for the infomercial, it really doesn't have much in the way of information, and since literally one person in the cast is listed, I'd venture to guess the black dude on the show is the person who wrote the whole thing. Purportedly the thing was put together by the advertising agencies Patrico-Sinare and Impulse Productions, but there really isn't Jack Shit out there in Internet-Land with any hard data about who and what they were, either. And since the infomercial doesn't have end credits, the identities of virtually everybody in it sans one remains a mystery to this day (and that's a shame, because there are at least two people on the program I'd love to see naked in straight-to-DVD B-movies from 2002.)
Such an undistinguished piece of Sega history, most people didn't even know Absolutely Rose Street was "lost media" when it was "recovered" after 20 years of obscurity. Needless to say, very, very few people likely ever saw the infomercial during its initial run, and of those who did, I can't imagine a large percentage of them were persuaded into purchasing a 32X. In fact, I'm willing to guess that Absolutely Rose Street didn't inspire a single goddamn person to buy a 32X, which means Sega LITERALLY squandered hundreds of thousands - perhaps even millions - of dollars on a pointless marketing campaign that didn't net them even $160 worth of profit.
And at the end of the day, I'd venture to guess that these "small" advertising disasters is what really put Sega out of the hardware manufacturing business. Yes, the disappointing Saturn and Dreamcast sales played a role, but had Sega not wasted millions on stuff like Absolutely Rose Street or the Sega Star Kids Challenge or Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloons, there's a possibility they could have at least scraped by for one more console generation. As evident by the monumental turd that was Rose Street, Sega was no doubt a repeat offender of one of the greatest no-nos in business; OVER-PROMOTION. By sinking so much money in pointless marketing gimmicks, the company put itself in an even bigger software and hardware hole that they could have possibly surmounted had they not spent such an astronomical amount on publicizing their shit. The over-advertising boom is what caused the great dotcom bust of 2000 and we're still seeing companies today make the same fatal mistake of investing too much into marketing that nets minimal market gains.
Perhaps we can all look back on something as misguided as Absolutely Rose Street and laugh at the cheesiness and absurdity of it all. But rest assured, as nostalgically terrible as it may be, it was "small" mistakes like this that wound up depriving us of a Dreamcast successor. Hardware and software manufacturers, do take note - if you want your company to go belly up in a real hurry, squandering capital on needless, pointless and ineffective publicity ploys of the like is the quickest way to make your I.P.O go D.O.A.
It's pretty much impossible to sum up what Absolutely Rose Street was in one sentence without making it sound like the ramblings of a peyote addict, so just bear with me, kids. You need the full picture to grasp this one, and trust me - this is a trip down memory lane I guarantee you won't regret.
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| Honestly, I WOULD rather watch this for half an hour instead of a bunch of hipster turds talking about video games. |
The presentation begins with a huge-boobed blonde woman wearing dark red lipstick with a nasally voice like Harley Quinn's saying the following infomercial is a paid advertisement from Sega, although she thinks it should've been her show, Stylin' With Stella, instead. We get a bunch of rapid, MTV-style flash cuts of surfers, skaters and dudes just hanging out by the beach juxtaposed with gameplay of Virtua Racing Deluxe and Doom. Then, for some reason, we get a REAL Environmental Protection Agency P.S.A. with a whole bunch of nature shots and tips on recycling paired with a proper 32x commercial showing a guy going to a carnival, getting knocked out, having visions of the Sega CD and waking up in a hay pile beside a bearded man dressed like a woman. So, yeah, they actually put commercials inside their infomercials, because - hell, I have nary the foggiest idea. So we get these two guys sitting in a room (who sound just like a bunch of guidos from Goodfellas) and they strategically shut off a TV right before some broad says the word "Nintendo." The executive tells the producer he wants them to produce a show pandering to the video game playing demographic and the producer says video gamers are all a bunch of losers whose brains have turned to mush (man, what a way to celebrate your target audience, huh?) We learn the producer's name is Joe Whitehead, and he visits the crew behind Game Beat, some indie local access TV show and holy shit, there's a Dreamcast logo spraypainted on the wall because sometimes, predictive programming is real.
Joe wastes no time before berating the crew, stating "headline, your show sucks." He says they need to radically overhaul the program or they're cancelled. By the way, if you want 1990s enforced-multiculturalism at its best, you can't beat the Game Beat cast, which includes a white dude, a black dude, an Asian dude and a kinda Hispanic looking token gamer girl. They ask Joe for a higher budget and new equipment and he describes video games as "the bing, the bong, he's up, he's down, he's in and out" and there is NO WAY to make that interesting. He also insults one of the kids by sarcastically calling him "a genius" and saying he bets he plays video games - then the cast hangs out by the beach during sunset while sad, grunge ballad music plays.
The Asian kid says he will have to go back to his job at Radio Shack, while the white guys say's his dad will tell him he should've gone to school instead. The white guy and the maybe Mexican chick walk down a side alley (at a slanted angle, of course) and she asks him what he thinks the biggest news in gaming is these days. She says Doom and the guy make a joke about everything being doom with her. Then, she says the greatest line I have ever heard: "Doom is coming to video games" (which, for those of you who need some retard script translated into English, means "Doom is being ported from the P.C. to home consoles."
So she talks about the new 32X being a "power charger" for the Genesis. She claims it can make the Genesis go "40 times faster," while the dude thinks it's all marketing hype (holy hell, why would they even hint at that in their own advertisement?) Regardless, the girl (who does remarkably look like a 20-something Tara Tainton) thinks the matter should be investigated further and circles some video game magazine copy about the 32X while the rest of the crew (wearing the most 90s-ish clothing you could imagine) hit the streets to interview teens about Sega's latest and greatest hardware.
Some talk about their fears of the "Sega or the Genesis" becoming obsolete. I'd like to say they are obviously plants, but at least paid plants would be able to properly name the systems they are talking about. Then the white dude wearing a shirt that just says "radio" on it starts doing this thing where he goes "heh, heh" while snapping his neck in and out like turtle. For absolutely no reason whatsoever.
The girl then sends a really passive aggressive instant message to Sega's media point person and when she hits the send button, her CRT monitor EXPLODES with a mini 32X commercial. Then it's time for an Incredible Crash Test Dummies commercial (man, how weird was it to hear Garfield's voice coming out of a fatal car crash victim?) and a Sega Game Gear ad where a fat retard hits himself in the head with a dead squirrel so his Game Boy will show more than two colors. The announcer trumpets games like "the new Ecco and Mortal 2" but all I can think about is how they were able to not only use in-game footage of Super Mario Land 2 in their commercial, but even the music from its soundtrack. Not that it's that effective of an ad to begin with - shit, I did a top 50 Game Gear games of all-time countdown and I can safely say SML2 is way better than anything Sega put out on its handheld.
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| Oh, the 1990s - when not only was making fun of the obese and retarded OK, it was practically encouraged! |
At this point, a graphic pops up on screen asking you to vote for the show you would rather see: Game Beat or Stylin' with Stella. Then the girl gamer meets Sega representative "Brad Granger" and the dude who designed Tomcat Alley in a warehouse and they tell her everything she saw in his email was confidential. Then they tell her about Midnight Raiders and how the 32X boosts the graphics and sound of live-action Sega CD games ... somehow. Brad and the chick exchange Shakespeare quotes in front of a giant Sonic and Knuckles cardboard cutout and the sexual tension is REAL, ya'll. She brings up Surgical Strike and Wirehead on the Sega CD and Virtua Racing, Doom and Eternal Champions (which never actually was released) on the 32x. She says she NEEDS to play and review these games because people are afraid they will make the Genesis and Sega CD obsolete and they finally cave in and agree to show her come software.
Cut to the rest of the nerds interviewing AMERICAN MCGEE in an arcade in front of an old school Outrun machine. He's wearing a Doom shirt and says practically nothing has been lost in the translation from the PC to the 32X and the graphics, sound and speed will be virtually identical. Well folks, there you have it - the greatest lie ever perpetrated against mankind. Also, he says you don't want to know what his dreams are like and the white guy cackles like a maniacal retard.
Now the chick is in a dark warehouse nook wearing a belly shirt and this feels so much like a mid-1990s softcore Showtime porno that I already have a boner. She shows off a 32X and a demo of Virtua Racing Deluxe (which, to be fair, is actually a really, really great port that's better than even the Saturn version.) Then we get a montage of them pretending to play the game and acting like 'tards while gameplay clips play over the picture-in-picture nonsense. They show the footage to Joe and he says he ain't impressed and that games are just "a phase" like the Hula hoop. The gang goes back to their warehouse studio thing and the black guy says he hopes Joe dies "a slow, slow painful death." I just noticed, the white guy kinda looks a little like Frank Mir. He says he has "every reason to be pissed" because his show got shit-canned and he thinks his girl is boning a 32X programmer. Then the black guy says "ego is the devil" and the kinda' white kids (who are probably dating, although it's never explicitly confirmed) chit chat for a bit. The guy apologizes for being a jerk earlier and she (wearing a skin-tight silver spandex shirt and coveralls) says to focus on finishing the show because revenge is a dish best served cold.
A telephone number flashes on the screen. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it was a hotline back in 1994 were you could vote on whether or not you liked Game Beat more than Stella's show. Because man, was that the kind of thing Sega really should've been spending its money on. So, Joe meets Stella backstage and they conspire to give her show the old Game Beat time slot and she smooches him and smears blood red lipstick all over his face. Now it's time for an anti-drug commercial with a dealer going to a basketball court and a fat black kid saying he doesn't need drugs because he needs to graduate and laugh and have a good life, but most of all, because he needs his punk dealer ass to leave the area right then and there. Then we get a fake commercial for Stella's show. She's wearing a sparkly red dress and her hair is up in a bun thingy and the show's logo is written in lipstick on a mirror behind her. Then we get a BIZARRE Genesis commercial in black and white with a surfer guy going to a morgue and being shown a competing console (I think it's supposed to be the SNES, but it looks way too blocky underneath the sheet) and everybody recoils when they show its remains offscreen. The commercial announcer says you can always add the 32X and Sega CD to your Genesis and footage of Jurassic Park and one of the later Joe Montana football games rolls. The ad concludes with the kid asking the mortician to burn the unnamed console, because nothing says "hardware sales" quite like creeping your customers the fuck out.
Now we get to watch the newest episode of Game Beat with Kristen Savage and Max Jackson. Yeah, those fuckos have actual names, but eh, like you or anybody else cares. So they walk around this "underground party" on Absolutely Rose Street holding mics and asking people random ass questions about the 32X. He's wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off like Nelson Muntz from The Simpsons while she's wearing a shimmery gold dress and dark brown lipstick (man, do I miss that look.) They talk about the heavily hyped 32X unit and wonder if it's' worth the hype or just media buzz (again, why in the fuck would Sega put doubt inside the heads of consumers in one of their own commercials?) Despite the white guy saying "Sega is the king of 16-bit," he's skeptical about the new hardware, ay one point asking if Sega "shot themselves in the foot" with the console add-on. And that, kids, is the definition of a "self-fulfilling prophecy."
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| Nope, it's not a screen shot from a random 2005 G4TV show. Like anybody could tell the difference, though. |
Max shows you how to put a 32X in your Genesis, list its $160 MSRP and lets you know you can STILL play your Genesis games through it. He says he gives the 32X "two fists up" while footage of Virtua Racing on a CRT atop a column plays. Get it, because of Columns and shit? Eh, that's probably giving the people who made this turd way too much credit.
We get a few seconds of the new Star Wars game and Savage says "all you Doomers" can be happy because Doom is on the 32X and it's "faster than a 486" and it's "going to put you in interstellar hell." Then Max holds a random CD-ROM and says the 32X is going to turbo boost your Sega CD games. The only problem, though, is that they don't actually have any live-action CD games to show off yet, so here area few cuts scenes from Midnight Raiders, Wirehead and Fahrenheit (the firefighting sim!) to tide you over. "What have video games gotten to?" Savage remarks. "Now we're saving people instead of killing them?"
Savage rhetorically asks whether the Genesis is dead and he keeps doing a Dr. Frankenstein impersonation saying "it's alive" over and over again while pointing at the 32X. To show the Genesis ain't dead yet, we get footage of NFL '95 and Sonic and Knuckles, complete with a demonstration of its much ballyhooed lock-on technology.
Good lord, this is the greatest parody of X-Play ever, except it came out a decade before X-Play was even on TV. Oh, there's also the new Eternal Champions game on the Sega CD, which is marketed as having the bloodiest deaths ever in a video game. Funny how they censor one of the fatalities, but don't bother blurring out the after-effects of said fatality with the bloody corpse fragments splattered all over the stage. Then the sorta' white girl busts the definitely white guy's balls by saying it's for mature audiences only so he can't play it.
She preps "Brad Granger" for an incognito meeting with Joe at the studio. He leaves a copy of Game Beat in a huge video box with the name of Stella's show written on the label. Joe and Stella (wearing a blue evening gown and looking like a way hotter version of Elizabeth Banks) are watching her show on TV, but just moments into the program it is interrupted by Game Beat. The next day Joe is called into the producer's office and he tries to explain what happened but the producer tells him he loved the show and the sponsors thought it was great. He tells him they want 26 more episodes produced and that they loved the joke "about the bimbo." We cut to the Game Beat crew hanging out on the beach discussing ideas for the next episode. The girl proposes "virtual reality theme parks in Japan" and mull ways they can bilk Joe out of money to send them on a paid vacation. Max thanks Brad (who now is rocking a Hawaiian shirt with his hair shagged out) for helping them put the show together. Then Joe gets on his knees and begs Stella to forgive him (if she cut her nails, she could play games, too, he tells her) and then she hits him with her purse and he screams "Sega!" because you'd expect him to scream "Stella!" because that's a reference to a preexisting work of some kind.
We cut to Stella taking phone calls while the phone number from earlier flashes on the screen. She thanks a caller for voting for her show and then she berates another caller for voting for Game Beat. We get one more paid advertisement notice from Sega and learn that Game Beat and Absolutely Rose Street are copyright protected by some non-Sega firm and - mercifully - that is all she wrote.
Well, I guess that pretty much speaks for itself, don't it? For those of you wanting more insight into the program, there's not a whole lot of info out there on the Intrawebs. Per some Sega wikis, the infomercial aired on Comedy Central, MTV and ESPN2 in November and December 1994, and believe it or not, it was actually promoted by a few Sega-backed magazines back in the day. While there is an IMDB page for the infomercial, it really doesn't have much in the way of information, and since literally one person in the cast is listed, I'd venture to guess the black dude on the show is the person who wrote the whole thing. Purportedly the thing was put together by the advertising agencies Patrico-Sinare and Impulse Productions, but there really isn't Jack Shit out there in Internet-Land with any hard data about who and what they were, either. And since the infomercial doesn't have end credits, the identities of virtually everybody in it sans one remains a mystery to this day (and that's a shame, because there are at least two people on the program I'd love to see naked in straight-to-DVD B-movies from 2002.)
Such an undistinguished piece of Sega history, most people didn't even know Absolutely Rose Street was "lost media" when it was "recovered" after 20 years of obscurity. Needless to say, very, very few people likely ever saw the infomercial during its initial run, and of those who did, I can't imagine a large percentage of them were persuaded into purchasing a 32X. In fact, I'm willing to guess that Absolutely Rose Street didn't inspire a single goddamn person to buy a 32X, which means Sega LITERALLY squandered hundreds of thousands - perhaps even millions - of dollars on a pointless marketing campaign that didn't net them even $160 worth of profit.
And at the end of the day, I'd venture to guess that these "small" advertising disasters is what really put Sega out of the hardware manufacturing business. Yes, the disappointing Saturn and Dreamcast sales played a role, but had Sega not wasted millions on stuff like Absolutely Rose Street or the Sega Star Kids Challenge or Macy's Thanksgiving Parade balloons, there's a possibility they could have at least scraped by for one more console generation. As evident by the monumental turd that was Rose Street, Sega was no doubt a repeat offender of one of the greatest no-nos in business; OVER-PROMOTION. By sinking so much money in pointless marketing gimmicks, the company put itself in an even bigger software and hardware hole that they could have possibly surmounted had they not spent such an astronomical amount on publicizing their shit. The over-advertising boom is what caused the great dotcom bust of 2000 and we're still seeing companies today make the same fatal mistake of investing too much into marketing that nets minimal market gains.
Perhaps we can all look back on something as misguided as Absolutely Rose Street and laugh at the cheesiness and absurdity of it all. But rest assured, as nostalgically terrible as it may be, it was "small" mistakes like this that wound up depriving us of a Dreamcast successor. Hardware and software manufacturers, do take note - if you want your company to go belly up in a real hurry, squandering capital on needless, pointless and ineffective publicity ploys of the like is the quickest way to make your I.P.O go D.O.A.
Thursday, February 4, 2016
A Tribute to Tecmo Bowl
A fond, reverential look back at the greatest football video game franchise ever.
By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X
When the term "football video game" comes up, most people think Madden. However, for old school purists, the term drums up heartfelt memories of one thing, and one thing only: Tecmo goddamn motherfucking shitting Bowl. (Official title? Just plain Tecmo Bowl.)
Indeed, while football games have certainly gotten more realistic looking and complex, the simple, unrefined joys of Tecmo Bowl remain the apex of the genre. As simple as the games were, they were just so much fun to play - who cares if you couldn't call 40 different audibles or challenge plays and the turf never deteriorated in real-time when you were having a blast just mowing down the opposing QB with a mere flick of the D-pad and racking up 1,000 yards a game in rushing offense? This series is so beloved that almost 30 years since the very first game came out, people are still playing it, cherishing it and - to a certain extent - worshiping it as the pinnacle of arcade sports game excellence.
That said, a lot of people tend to overlook just how long the series has been around. Make no mistakes, this is a franchise whose import stretches well beyond the scope of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and even a little bit before it. As the rest of American society tries to make itself excited for a Super Bowl 50 matchup nobody is really all that interested in watching, I've decided to take the time and effort to shine a spotlight on an entirely different kind of Bowl - one that has not only shaped video gaming culture, but really, American football culture itself.
So grease up your palms, keep your eyes on the cathode ray tube and whatever you do, don't let anybody pick the Detroit Lions; it's time to pay our respects to the best football video game series ever...
Tecmo Bowl
Arcade (1987)
The first Tecmo Bowl game is the odd duck of the franchise. While it has many similarities to the Tecmo Bowl we all know and love, it's certainly a standalone game with no real connection to any of the subsequent entries. For starters, there are no NFL teams or players. In fact, there are only two teams to choose from - a generic red-bedecked squad called the Bulldogs and a blue-clad ensemble called the Wildcats. The iconography is clearly meant to mimic the college football experience, right down to the Big House-inspired stadium. Speaking of big, the cabinet for this sumbitch was one of the hugest of its time - next to the old six-man Konami X-Men coin-op, it had to have been the largest arcade unit floating around in the early George H.W. years. The two-screen cabinet was also one of the biggest coin-op scams of the decade, forcing you to pump quarters into the machine every 30 seconds to keep playing it; to finish an entire game - and thus, see that awesome concluding cinematic of fans tearing down the goalpost - you had to drop at least six bucks in pocket change. The gameplay is also pretty weird, chiefly in the fact that you don't get to pick plays - each down you find yourself in a randomly generated formation (sometimes you are working out of the shotgun, sometimes you are in the I-form) - and you can't change receivers or backs once the ball has been snapped (which, naturally, leads to a lot of QB scrambling.) While it's perhaps too simplistic a game nowadays, it did have some pretty cool touches, including the ability to jump for passes, break tackles with some joystick twiddling finesse and the big one, lateral the ball like a motherfucker. It's an extraordinary limited game, but it is worth at least one playthrough - especially on the .ROM sites, where thankfully, you don't have to shell out enough money for a McDonalds combo meal to play it. (Note: the game is also available as a Wii download and is featured on the Xbox compilation disc Tecmo Classic Arcade, which the Internet tells me IS compatible with the Xbox360 if you've downloaded the proper updates. As for its functionality on the XboxOne? You'll have to Google that shit on your own, whippersnapper.)
Tecmo Bowl
NES (1989)
Well, what more can be said about this one? With the possible exception of Walter Payton Football on the Sega Master System, this was the first American football game on a home console worth a damn. Seriously, have you people ever attempted to play stuff like 10 Yard Fight, NES Play-Action Football and God pity your soul, LJN'S NFL? While the game is undoubtedly limited, what is included is just balls-out fantastic 8-bit sports action. The lack of a proper NFL license hurts it (yeah, time for the Chicago Penguins Holding Harps to take on the Denver Blue-Hair Unicorn Chicks!) as does the fact the game only has a dozen teams to choose from, but at the end of the day, the core gameplay is just so satisfying hardly any of that matters. As soon as that awesome, Jock Jams before there were Jock Jams theme picks up (before slowly transitioning to what I have always thought sounded like the opening instrumental from Family Feud) you just KNOW good times are ahead of you. Sure, I could bore you with the same old commentary about how unstoppable Bo Jackson is in the game or how easy it was to block punts with L.T. and Dexter Manley, but for me, it has always been the little things that made this one so memorable; lobbing automatic touchdowns in the shotgun to receivers running curl routes, double teaming the shit out of Jerry Rice, LOL-ing at Minnesota's god-awful reverse run play,the fact that all of the black players were actually purple and, of course, all of that blatant advertising for Rygar. To this day, this game remains one of the funnest multiplayer sports experiences on the Nintendo; who'd thunk so many years of joy could've been derived from only four offensive plays, no?
Tecmo Bowl
Famicom (1990)
In the pantheon of Tecmo Bowl games, this one is oft-considered the "lost" sheep of the series. By and large, it is the exact same game Americans got in 1989; the same teams, the exact same plays, hell, there isn't even any kanji to be seen. However, there have been considerable changes to the team rosters, which benefit a few squads and are to the detriment of a few others. Eric Dickerson is no longer with Indianapolis (as is the case with the second edition printings of Tecmo Bowl USA), Mark Green replaces Dennis Gentry as kickoff man in Chicago, Cleveland rises up the defensive tiers with the addition of linebacker Clay Matthews, and because he wasn't overpowered ENOUGH, Bo Jackson is actually even faster in this one then he is in the American version. But it is San Francisco that came out the best, gaining a killer defensive add in linebacker Chris Haley and a HUGE offensive upgrade in wideout John Taylor. Frankly, if you've played NES version of Tecmo Bowl, you've more or less played this game. Still, it's pretty cool knowing there is a slightly modified version of the iconic pigskin title out there - especially when it has cartridge art as WTF as this one.
Tecmo Bowl
Game Boy (1991)
All in all, this is an extremely well-done port of the NES game, which sacrifices astonishingly little in the migration to the teeny-tiny monochrome screen. As with its NES older brother, you get 12 teams to choose from, each porting about four offensive plays a piece. Obviously, there is a limited color palette, but the sprites themselves are actually fairly detailed, and the graphics are well above average for the platform. Where the game really shines, however, is the audio department; not only is the music in the game on par with the music from the NES version, it might be even better (although some of the other sound effects, like the quarterback signals, are far more primitive.) Gameplay-wise, you really can't complain about anything here; the controls are virtually identical to the 8-bit game and the core fundamentals are totally unchanged. Toss the ball to a covered receiver? Yeah, that's still going to be an automatic INT. Hand the ball off to Sweetness when Dallas is geared up for coverage down field? Yeah, that's an effortless touchdown, just like on the Nintendo. There really weren't that many sports games on the original Game Boy, and this has to be far and away the best football game released for the system. If you've never played it, it is definitely worth checking out, if absolutely nothing else, to see the miraculous job the programmers did converting the title. Pour yourself a glass of Dirty Sprite, make sure the AC adapter is plugged in and watch those defenders bounce into the fifth row whenever Bo storms down the sideline - this game is pure, old-school Tecmo Bowl bliss, through and through. And as fate would have it? It would also be the only portable Bowl we'd be able to get our hands on for more than a decade. But more on that forgotten piece of Tecmo history a little bit later, dear reader...
Tecmo Super Bowl
NES (1991)
For my money, Tecmo Super Bowl isn't just the best football game on the NES. In my humblest o' opinions, it's the absolute BEST NES game ever, the best 8-bit title ever released and quite possibly the absolute best sports video game of all-time (it's certainly neck and neck with NHL '94, at the absolute least.) Despite all of the praise the game receives - and has been receiving for a quarter century now - we still tend to overlook just how revolutionary this game actually was. Released extremely late in the NES life cycle (the SNES was already on the market by the time it hit store shelves), Tecmo Super Bowl can rightly lay claim to being the last "must-experience" 8-bit Nintendo offering. While the core gameplay is unchanged from its precursor, everything around it was amped up to 11, creating far and away the most comprehensive, features-loaded sports game of the third console generation. Not only did the game have every contemporary NFL team represented - complete with accurate representations of their respective 1991-92 rosters - the playbook was vastly expanded, a robust season mode was added and the presentation - complete with the iconic cutscenes of defenders looking like they are taking a piss on quarterbacks following sacks - was unlike anything we had ever seen in a sports game up to that point. This title took the tried and true Tecmo Bowl gameplay and absolutely perfected it, creating the most accessible - yet surprisingly nuanced - video pigskin offering ever. The term "timeless" gets thrown around a lot in the video game world, but TSB is one of the rare titles that is precisely that - it was a hoot when it first came out, it was every bit as fun and addictive in the Dreamcast era and now - in a world of smart phones and tablet devices completely unfathomable in the NES era - it's still an absolute blast to kick back and play. This game isn't just the zenith of virtual football - it might just be the zenith of virtual entertainment altogether. (And as an aside: 25 years later, I still hate the ever-loving shit out of Christian Okoye, and everything he has ever stood for.)
Tecmo Super Bowl
Genesis and SNES (1993)
Now here is a game that tends to get a bad rap. Released two years after TSB on the NES, this iteration is fundamentally the same game, albeit with the obvious graphical and audio upgrades. The rosters, of course, now reflect the 1993-94 season, so most of the teams that were great on the Nintendo - the Raiders, the Eagles, the Lions - now suck like a turbo-charged vacuum cleaner. By and large, this is one of the most unbalanced sports games of the 16-bit console generation, with five overpowered teams (Dallas, San Fran, Washington, the Giants and Buffalo) and a lot of teams fluctuating from mediocre (Atlanta, Houston) to flat out turd-tactic (Seattle, New England.) The playbooks are more or less the same as in the NES iteration, but the gameplay feels quite different. It's had to describe, but I guess the best way to put it is that the players feel a whole lot floatier - unlike in the Nintendo version, you never really feel as if you have 100 percent control of your receivers, especially when it comes to quarterback scrambling. Audiovisually, things are spruced up quite a bit, and there is a greater emphasis on cutscenes. In fact, on certain plays, if the defense has accurately guesstimated your call, as soon as you snap the ball a cut scene is triggered featuring your back getting Rock Bottomed behind the line of scrimmage. Yeah, that does get old, and fast. Alas, despite the over-reliance on the gimmick, the core gameplay is almost as smooth and satisfying as it is on the NES, and the heightened graphics definitely make this one a totally different aesthetic experience. Granted, it is more of remake than a full-fledged sequel (apparently, that's the Internet's biggest criticism of the offering), but you know what? It's still a fun, engaging and hard to put down arcade sports experience. And it's also notable for being one of the few SNES sports games - alike Boxing Legends of the Ring and Super High Impact - that is objectively superior to the Genesis version (thanks in no small part to having a better soundtrack, which is fundamentally a pseudo-industrial remix of TSB tracks from the NES game.)
Tecmo Super Bowl II: Special Edition
Genesis and SNES (1995)
This is probably the rarest of the mass produced, physical copy Tecmo Super Bowls out there. In fact, only 15,000 copies of the SNES version were purportedly shipped to the U.S., making it one of the few sports games from the era that will cost you more than a few bucks on eBay these days. The game is really strange in a number of facets; indeed, at times, it feels more like a prototype for the third and final TSB than an actual standalone game. Structurally, the gameplay is exactly what you'd expect. The field is still displayed horizontal, and the hyper-fast pass and run mechanics are unchanged. However, there are some differences. For one thing, you now have two playbooks to choose from, which finally makes defensive play a more strategic part of the game. But the big one is a loaner from Madden - the ability to call audibles when you just know the secondary is about to blitz your ass to the stone age. You get a solid season mode, a slew of multiplayer modes and the graphics are certainly a vast improvement over the visuals in the first 16-bit TSB. While the SNES version looks and sounds slightly better, the controls and overall gameplay are MUCH better on the Genesis (I attribute it to that Blast Processing, naturally.) Oh, and the coolest thing about this game (and really, the reason it is worth going out of your way to experience?) It gives you the option to play as every NFL team from the 1992, 1993 and 1994 season. Which means, yes, FINALLY, you can stage that fantasy match up between the 4-12 '92 Phoenix Cardinals and the 2-14 '94 Houston Oilers, just like in your dreams.
Tecmo Super Bowl III: Final Edition
Genesis and SNES (1995)
While I will always consider Tecmo Super Bowl on the NES to be the zenith of the franchise, the third and final 16-bit iteration of the series is a kinda' close second. From the opening cinematic - which feels more like something out of The Terminator than Madden - you are just getting a bang-up experience from start-to-finish. The player models, stadiums and animations are all vastly improved, and the playbooks have been enhanced to create a slightly more simulation-like experience (although the core gameplay is still all about the hot and heavy arcade action.) The audibles return and the season mode has been beefed up considerably - in fact, now you can sign free agents and even make your own damn football players and mold them into homegrown superstars over the course of the season (a feature, I might add, which is really a game unto itself.) Sure, it has some glitches here and there (sometimes, when the ball is fumbled, the defender who scoops up the ball will magically transform into an offensive player and recover the pigskin), but on the whole, this is arguably the most satisfying, holistic football game experience of Bill Clinton's first term of office (although Madden '94 and Bill Walsh College Football '95 REALLY put up a fight for that superlative.) Both versions are very, very good, but I consider the Genesis version the superior offering. Its sound may not be as impressive, but the football action is much faster and more fluid, and I actually prefer its animations to the Super Nintendo iteration. You can't go wrong with either, however, and if you've never played this game before, you are really missing out on some high-scoring, mid-90s cartridge-based excellence.
Tecmo Super Bowl
Playstation (1996)
Now here is a game I had totally forgotten about. Released in the weird transitional phase from the SNES to the N64, perhaps it is not too surprising the game never got a fair shake in the marketplace. In hindsight though, this is actually a really damn good game, which does an admirable job of fusing the old school Tecmo Bowl arcade model with the emerging, NFL GameDay type of simulation. By and large, the game plays a LOT like the last 16-bit TSB, albeit with improved visuals, MUCH better sound (it is a CD-ROM based game, isn't it?) and way, WAY more playbook options. The create-a-player mode from Final Edition is back, but it's kind of a moot point because the in-game team editor gives you the ability to trade as many players as you want - or even rename them, overhaul their technical abilities and change their ethnicity, if you so want. Still, you get a full play-by-play announcer (standard now, I know, but MIND BLOWING at the time), semi-3D player models and the biggie, a totally controllable 360 game camera - which means, yes, you CAN play the game from a vertical perspective, if that's your fancy. All in all, this is just a dandy pick-up-and-play experience, which holds up a LOT better than the more realistic, strategic Madden offerings from the era. This one really deserves more recognition - especially from TSB aficionados, who may have initially written it off as an unappealing novelty 20 years ago.
Tecmo Bowl
Mobile (2003)
Unless you want to count the Tiger Electronics LCD "port" of Tecmo Super Bowl released in 1993, this was the first portable version of Tecmo Bowl on the market in at least a dozen years. Due to the media format it was released on, however, the game has all but vanished from the face of the earth; I tried as hard as I could, but I couldn't find a single .ROM of the title anywhere. In fact, any information on the game is pretty hard to come by today; there are a few screenshots floating around the Internet, but beyond a few old IGN and Gamespot reviews, that's about it. I even reached out to Brad of tecmobowl-vs-rbi.com, one of the absolute best online repositories for info on Tecmo Bowl, and he was stumped. "I did look for a YouTube video quickly out of of curiosity, but found none," said the dude who is so into Tecmo Bowl that he covered his body in pixel art from the game. "I've always been aware of it, but not interested enough to seek it out." So, uh, what do we know about the game? Well, it came out in the early 2000s and was produced by Tecmo's short-lived mobile game department. Remember, this game came out six years before the first generation iPhone was released, so we're not talking touch-screen gameplay; you had to play this sumbitch with a QWERTY keyboard or the old touch-tone dial pad, like it was a ColecoVision game or something. There was no NFL license or players, and 16 teams to choose from. Gameplay, per the old video game site reviews, was fairly similar to the NES iteration of the game, although the reviewers in question never really got into the specifics of how the controls worked. Did you push "5" to move forward and "6" to hike the ball, or did you select a play and a designated route runner and the game ran it for you, RPG-style? Sadly, it looks like we'll never find out; unless someone still has a Nokia phone from '03 - that's still in working condition, with this game still installed on it - this is one version of Tecmo Bowl that appears last to the ravages of time forever.
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
DS (2008)
Excluding the mobile phone game, this was the first handheld TSB to drop in 17 years, and the first TSB you could walk into a store and purchase in 12. Among Tecmo Super Bowl enthusiasts, it is a very controversial title; the consensus, however, seems to be that it's a halfhearted nostalgic cash-grab, simply using the TSB handle without capturing any of the magic of the old-school 8-bit and 16-bit titles. While Kickoff no doubt has some shortcomings, I have to disagree with the majority (a shocker, I know.) All in all, this is actually a pretty sound little football game and easily the best handheld pigskin game on the DS ... which, yeah, is sort of like declaring yourself the most intelligent kid in remedial math, but whatever. Since EA gobbled up the NFL license all to themselves, there are no NFL logos or players when you first boot up the game - just a bunch of random dudes and teams with monikers like the Los Angeles Supercocks and Pittsburgh Poisons. Thankfully, however, the game comes with a fairly robust create-a-team and create-a-player editor, so if you have enough dedication and time on your hands, you can easily restyle every player in the game to contemporary pro football stars (just as long as their names don't sound like curse words ... imagine my surprise when I tried to rename a character "Matt Cassell" and the game wouldn't let me.) You get a decent regular season mode and multiplayer, including WiFi enabled online play. And that's where things get a bit disappointing. While the gameplay, overall, is fairly enjoyable, there are a lot of iffy things about the control scheme; it is way too easy to get intercepted and running the ball feels stiff (shit, its even a little difficult to do the iconic Tecmo Bowl zig-zag.) The stylus play does very little to improve the passing game (in fact, it probably makes it worse) and whoever decided to include those goofy "power-ups" deserves a thorough lambasting. That said, if you can just appreciate the game for what it offers and what it mostly follows through on, I think you'll find this one to be a rather entertaining little diversion. And for you trivia hounds out there, Tecmo originally had plans to port this game to the Wii, as well; following the slow sales of Kickoff, however, they retooled the title into Family Fun Football, which, as you'd imagine, looks like absolute and total shit.
Tecmo Bowl Throwback
Xbox 360 and Playstation3 (2010)
To date, the last Tecmo Bowl game was an online download for the PS3 and Xbox360. Designed by the same guys who made the cult Xbox hits Death Row and XIII, the game is - at the same time - a loving homage to the Tecmo Bowl mythos and a much-more-entertaining-than-it-should-have-been standalone football offering. Of course, the game is sans an official NFL license and no actual players appear, but as with Kickoff on the DS, you can easily rename the characters and franchises to imitate their real-world pro football counterparts. The $10 download had both single-player and multiplayer options, with all of the usual season mode shenanigans. In terms of gameplay, it is actually a lot less in-depth than TSB II and III on the Genesis and SNES, instead offering a more pared back, offensive-oriented arcade score-fest a'la the NES masterpiece. The graphics are very sleek, but if you want, all you have to do is push one button and the game switches from 16:9 3D visuals to old-school, 8-bit 4:3 ratio sprites. Granted, the feature loses its appeal after awhile, but it is nonetheless fun to transform into 2D-mode to cap off a long TD run. Sure, it's not the full-fledged sequel to TSB on the PS1 we've been waiting for for 15 years, but for what it is - and isn't - this is still a pretty entertaining romp down memory lane. An iPhone version was released a year later - and although I've never played it, it looks pretty much identical to the console version.
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| Shameless product placement ... in a Tecmo game? Get out of here! |
And there you have it folks, almost 30 years worth of Tecmo Bowl nostalgia. Seeing as how Tecmo is in dire financial straits these days and Electronic Arts won't give up the NFL license until at least the year 3080, odds are we probably won't be seeing any new Tecmo Bowl offerings for quite some time. That said, even if we have indeed seen the last of the series, we can at least take take solace in the fact that, for a good ten year stretch or so, the franchise gave us some of the most entertaining arcade football games ever. Despite all of the fancy graphics and online play and ability to download rosters and gameplay that corresponds to the NFL's real-world concussion protocols (really), today's football video games just can't match the simplistic wonder of Tecmo Bowl. Yes, it is a weird imitation of American football and I'd be lying if I said it is the most technical sports game achievement out there, but what the games lack in realism, they more than make up for it in good old-fashioned fun. The gameplay was accessible to all, but nuanced enough to provide a literally endless array of single player and multiplayer possibilities. As good as games like Zelda and Metroid may be, they are still the same game - with the same bad guys in the same spot and the same bosses moving in the same pattern - every time you play it. With sports games like Tecmo Bowl, however, every time you pick up the pad, it is a different experience. No two games of TSB ever play out the same, and thanks to the hilarity of human err, every Tecmo Bowl contest has an aura of unpredictability to it.
To this day, Tecmo Bowl and its long-line of successors - most notably, of course, being TSB on the NES - have maintained a huge following, with national tournaments held throughout the country, ESPN producing a full-length documentary on its significance to the world of sports, and even die-hard Tecmo Bowl techies who hack the TSB .ROM files to create annually-updated versions of the game with contemporary teams, rosters and stats (and if that wasn't enough, there are even some folks out there who have created entirely new games out of the tried-and-true engine, including the only NCAA-themed football games you'll be playing anytime soon.)
Simply put, Tecmo Bowl is much more than an old video game series. It is a part of the American sports vernacular and a reminder of just how simple, uncomplicated and unpretentious video games used to be. There may be prettier and more realistic and more features-loaded pigskin sims out there, but to this day, I don't think I've ever played a football video game as absorbing, as addictive and as enjoyable as the games spawned by Tecmo Bowl. We're still talking about 'em 25 years later, and we're going to be talking about them 50 years later. Shit, we'll probably be living on the fuckin' moon some day, still talking about the infamous "nose tackle trick."
Consoles come and go, you know, but true greatness never goes away. As long as there is both football and video games, people will forever flock back to Tecmo Bowl - and they will continue to celebrate it, as one would any unconquered champion of the gridiron.
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