With The Darkness II delayed into February (having been originally slated for an October release) after having mercilessly teased me with brutal gameplay footage, I had to satisfy my need for more Darkness by revisiting the Starbreeze original.

The Darkness was one of the first handful of games I played for this generation of consoles (I was something of a late adopter), and it seems like an obvious game for me to play: as a super-powered shooter based on a comic, it covers most of my bases. I picked the title up based on those very virtues, but truth be told, when the game began, I thought that maybe I had made a mistake.

The flaws are easy to spot: the shooting mechanic is sloppy, with an auto-aim that fails as often as it functions; it’s possible to expend entire clips without hitting the enemy, regardless of the fact that the red reticule hovers directly over them; weapon control is hardly fluid, making it hard to acquire targets both up close and at range.

Meanwhile, enemies react inconsistently to weapons fire and can take a few too many shots before going down. The result is that, if the player takes a guns-only approach, the experience is imbalanced and unsatisfying—and this is almost damning in the first mission of the game, before the powers of the Darkness are unlocked.

Those powers redeem the gameplay in an immediate fashion, and remain the driving force and saving grace throughout. Though the mechanic offers only four basic powers (one of which being a set of special guns that fall prey to the flawed shooting mechanic), each offers unique applications and a visceral sense of empowerment.

In the final chapters, the player becomes grossly overpowered, but like much of the game, this imbalance is in service to the narrative. As an eclipse falls, the Darkness becomes a force of nature; lights shatter as Jackie passes them, darkling minions spawn endlessly from the dark and run rampant. Jackie smashes through an army of mobsters, the Darkness dragging him, lurching forward, ripping and tearing.

In a genre that is caked in inflated, meaningless violence, it’s surprising that it can still have weight in a game as deliberately over the top as The Darkness—but that’s where the Darkness succeeds: in its sincerity, in genuine characters and conflict that create an atmosphere of gravity and hopelessness.

Violence is something the player seeks naturally in a game such as this; it is, of course, why we play shooters—but in this game, the player does so with the knowledge that he damns Jackie with each life taken, and a sense of hopelessness and grim futility sets in, reinforced at every step by Mike Patton’s voice of the Darkness, whispering in the player’s ear, urging him to violence.

It’s an interesting twist on the common convention of the voice in the head of the player; the commanding officers and Cortanas and Anya Strouds that are nigh-ubiquitous in the shooter realm. They tell us to move up, to run here, to shoot there—to hold the line or complete the objective. The Darkness is a little different; it wants Jackie to survive, but only in such a way that he suffers, that he can be subjugated. The Darkness is a mad, timeless demon that needs to own Jackie—and it does this by giving everything the player is asking for.

The Darkness doesn’t want you to think about consequence, it doesn’t want to encourage empathy—it spurs you to tear men in half and eat their hearts. It howls at you when you’re human and chuckles grimly when you’re not.

There’s a relationship there, too, because the Darkness cares for Jackie—it cares for him in the way that it must care for itself, because, functionally, it is Jackie. It can’t hate him, it can’t kill him; it has to convince him that it is on his side—that they are in things together. It’s the ultimate unhealthy relationship that the Darkness tries to cultivate by giving Jackie the power to take his revenge, by begging him to take it.

This creates a push and pull, the sort that characterizes any good fictional relationship: when both parties need each other, when there’s something of a tug of war that nobody can ever win. It’s startlingly authentic for a story about a cosmic devil-god bound to a mob hitman, where even the monster can elicit a scrap of empathy and is vulnerable even in its perfect evil; it needs Jackie, needs him to protect it by surviving.

Patton offers a performance that is perhaps one of the best the videogame industry has seen, his voice hissing, bubbling and cracking, espousing a true and genuine inhumanity that paints the character brilliantly—but it isn’t just Patton that makes this work.

The other side of the equation is Kirk Acevedo—who players may recognize as Charlie Francis from Fringe. Acevedo’s Jackie speaks in a sober whisper, sorrowful even when furious, detached, and perpetually disaffected by his lot in life. Jackie is the good guy who does bad things, empathetic, but deeply flawed.

Jackie is endeared to the player throughout the game, especially during the loading screen monologues, where Jackie might recall a childhood memory, provide a humorous anecdote, or swear grim oaths. He brings sense of life to the city, having tales of its characters, memories and attachments to its landmarks. Early in the game, if the player so chooses, Jackie can sit down and watch the entirety of To Kill A Mockingbird with his girlfriend, and its nuances such as this that serves to bind the player to him.

In the end, Jackie loses. The player completes his objectives, passes the final stage, the credits roll—but Jackie loses. There was never a possibility that he could win, in part for his own choices, but also because the player was there making sure he lost, listening to the Darkness and doing the things that damn him.

Deciding the fate of our characters has become an increasingly common feature of modern videogames; our actions dictate endings, or our placement on a morality scale—and it creates the sensation that we have helped our avatars grow and succeed in their tasks.

Rarely does the player look to hurt his character, to impede his progress, to diminish him. Of course, The Darkness doesn’t offer that choice—but if it did, would it really be a choice? Would one choose to send Jackie home, to swear off murder and vengeance? Send him off into the sunset to become a better person?

In the end, after shredding my way through hundreds of men and women to reach the final moments, chasing my revenge to the top of a lighthouse, I decided I didn’t want to follow through. Enough was enough; I wanted to save Jackie’s soul.

It was an absurd notion; as if his humanity could be restored after everything Jackie had done, as if sparing one life could rectify… anything. Only in fiction is the hero redeemed for staying his hand of final revenge, a ludicrous device. Still, at this time, suddenly, I wanted to do the morally upstanding thing and not rip out my enemy’s heart.

Of course, I understood that The Darkness wasn’t that sort of game—but I tried anyway. I backed away, I holstered my weapons, I sent the Darkness into remission—and I waited. I waited to see if maybe, just maybe, I had a choice here.

I didn’t.

I even tried to walk away, to leave the lighthouse and revenge behind—but as I said, The Darkness isn’t that sort of game. Even though I wanted it to be, it couldn’t be, because Jackie never had a choice. He was a prisoner of the Darkness, of his own misery, and of course, of you, and I, and the things we expect from our videogames.

If you told me that I had made this all up, that none of this really existed in that product, I probably couldn’t deny it. I love The Darkness, and I’ve spent a lot of time (over) thinking about it—and maybe to you it’s just a fun shooter with a solid script. It whispered to me, though—and if a narrative is possessed of such sincerity that I can extrapolate ramblings such as these from it, then there must be something there.

I don’t know if The Darkness II will carry the torch, in that respect. I’ve seen the game played, and I know that they have taken the gameplay to a new level: faster, sharper, and expanded—and certainly, that is something to applaud. The care and quality of a narrative, though? That is something that can’t be grasped from a demo. I have little doubt that Digital Extremes can craft a great demonic shooter—but whether they will produce a worthy successor to The Darkness remains to be seen.

I had never gotten rid of any of my old videogames from when I was a kid, and I even made enough use of them to justify taking them with me when I left the comfort of my parent’s basement.

I don’t remember the exact moment I started “collecting” videogames, I just started buying the old games that I remembered liking but never owned as a kid – some I’d rented, others that I’d played at friend’s houses. From there I got into games and systems that I never had access to, such as the Turbo Grafx-16 and Sega Master System. It was during my introduction to the Master System that I heard about the numerous ports of popular Genesis games that had graced the console. Titles such as Altered Beast, Streets of Rage 2 and even Mortal Kombat all saw 8-bit Master System releases. Intrigued, I started collecting and discovering them for myself, and the game that intrigued me most was the Master System version of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Released on Oct. 25th 1991, just four short months after North America saw the release of the original Genesis Sonic game, Sonic the Hedgehog also holds the dubious distinction of being the last Master System game released on the console in North America. Sega’s 8-bit darling could never make any headway in North America, what with the total dominance of the Nintendo Entertainment System, and thus fizzled out of existence.

The 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog is a game that I really wished I had access to when I was a kid. My brother and I got a Genesis instead of a Super Nintendo back in the halcyon days of our youth, and didn’t regret it for a second, although I did get a SNES a few years later. I was one of the many who had been swayed by the “extreme attitude” and “radical speed” of Sonic the Hedgehog and the Genesis itself.

Sonic the Hedgehog may have represented the dawning of a new era on the Genesis and for Sega as a company, but it also symbolized the peak of the Master System. Few games released for Sega’s 8-bit console pushed the hardware limits as far as Sonic the Hedgehog did. Nearly everything from the Genesis version made the transition; a catchy, memorable soundtrack, the plethora of power-ups, the speed, the hiccup free gameplay, the smooth-as-silk animation… everything. About the only thing that couldn’t be recreated on the Master System was the ring-explosion. Instead of having all of your collected rings bust loose in every direction when you take damage, 8-bit Sonic just spews forth a few symbolic rings.

The 8-bit version of Sonic the Hedgehog is partially based on the Game Gear version, although the Game Gear has less than equal sound and lower resolution graphics, as well as a different Sonic sprite. The level design more closely mirrors that of the Genesis version, not having to account for the Game Gear’s smaller screen size. That being said, the level design is superb, with two zones created specifically for the Master System port.

The Master System enjoyed unmatched success and longevity outside of North America. In regions such as Europe and Brazil it was a serious rival to Nintendo’s under-supported PAL NES console. The North American release of Sonic the Hedgehog is so rare and sought by collectors that complete copies routinely sell for around $200 USD. Strangely, the only difference between a $10 UK copy of the game and the North American version is a sticker over the UPC bar code.

My love of collecting videogames may have started with a wave of nostalgia, but it was driven forward by my love of great videogames, regardless of their age and sophistication… and that’s what Sonic the Hedgehog for the Master System is – a great videogame.

As a child I never did beat the original Metroid, nor did I complete its sequel, come to think of it. The Metroid games were something of mystery, an impossible enigma. There was an older kid in my neighborhood who had a code (his own personal password, you see) for the original NES game. He wouldn’t allow us into his parents basement until he had entered it, for fear of his password becoming common knowledge. We didn’t really care, though, because we just wanted to watch in awe while he decimated Motherbrain and gutted the white whale that was Metroid right in front of us.

The original Metroid for the Nintendo Entertainment System was among Nintendo’s earliest successes. Released very early in the life of Nintendo’s freshman console, Metroid struck a chord with gamers of the era. Boasting an enormous world, tons of upgradable weapons and armor, and an open ended freedom that is even today referred to as “Metroid-esque”, the game was key in exhibiting what could be achieved on home consoles. Add to that a highly effective minimalist soundtrack that perfectly complimented the bleak and lonesome atmosphere of the game itself, and Metroid was destined to be a masterpiece.

And then Nintendo surprised players by releasing the sequel for their newly portable Game Boy system.

Produced by famed Nintendo internal development team R&D1 and the father of the Game Boy itself, Gunpei Yokoi, Metroid II: The Return of Samus pushed the Game Boy’s capabilities to the limits in recreating sprites nearly identical to the 8-bit console predecessor.

The lack of background detail in the game, which was at the time (and even today) the biggest complaint levied against the game, are actually a key part of the game’s construct. Knowing it would be impossible to match the visuals of the original, Gunpei and team instead used minimalist design and high contrast to add a stark emotionless expression to the isolated planet SR388, where parallax scrolling and color were absent.

The story takes place after the original Metroid, and is currently 6th in the overall series continuity, chronologically existing just before the brilliant Super Metroid and after Metroid Prime 3: Corruption.

In Metroid II, Samus is sent by the Galactic Federation to destroy the Metroids at their source: SR388, their home planet. As Samus you execute the Metroid formula – blasting your way through the planet, collecting power-ups and upgrades, vying to reach the Mother Queen and incinerate it.

The Return of Samus is notable for the fact that it features the debut of the Varia suit, the costume most identified with Samus and the series as a whole. In fact, it is the duo-tone color palette of the Game Boy which is responsible for the Varia suit’s iconic round shoulders. These were added to differentiate it from the regular suit, since color was not available to make the difference obvious.

After destroying the Mother Queen and setting in motion the events that will destroy all Metroids and their entire natural ecosystem, a stray Metroid hatches and imprints onto Samus during her escape form the planet. Samus cannot bring herself to kill the orphaned Metroid, and the game ends with the two of them escaping the planet’s destruction together.

With a plot that is developed, and plays a key role in influencing events throughout the series, Metroid II stands head and shoulders above the majority of the Game Boy’s library and should be experienced by every series fan and action adventure game fan alike.

And as the NES found its way into more living rooms, it became an ideal platform for the ultimate casual player time-sink; puzzle games.

From my own childhood, I can comfortably say that the release of the NES version of Tetris caused a massive influx of casual gaming interest. Different from the Wii boom, this was still a time when videogames were viewed as little more than children’s toys, and as a result this first casual revolution did not serve to sell more Nintendo consoles to casual players but instead saw game time on your own Nintendo eroded, chiefly by your parent’s newly sparked interest in your toy.

Over its lifespan, the NES saw some of the most beloved and enduring puzzle games in history grace its 72-pin connector. Titles such as Tetris (the GameBoy iteration is arguably the greatest videogame ever made), Dr. Mario, Yoshi, and Yoshi’s Cookie, Irem’s Kickle Cubicle, Lode Runner, Solomon’s Key, and even such action/puzzle hybrid games as The Adventures of Lolo, Rainbow Islands, and Bomberman.

Of course there is one puzzle game I feel rises above all the rest, and remains today one of the greatest and most under-appreciated from that era.

Released by Nintendo in July 1990, and developed by famed studio Rare, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll stands alone in its unique action/puzzle gameplay offering. Taking a page from Atari’s 1984 coin-op Marble Madness, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll’s gameplay takes place on a colorful multiscreen isometric grid, complete with platforms and terrain.

You play as a snake, navigating these multi-leveled isometric playing fields in search of “Nibbley Pibbleys”, small sphere like creatures, which you eat. Consuming nibbley pibbleys increases the overall length of your snake ,and thereby increases the amount of damage you can take.

After enough nibbley pibbleys are eaten, your now lengthened body will begin to blink, signalling that you can now exit the stage. Your biggest threats are environmental hazards such as spikes and pits, and the various enemies that roam the levels. When damaged, you risk losing segments of your body. Preventing this at all costs is important, because after finding the exit to a level, you can only unlock the door by first standing on a weight scale located nearby. If you are too light, the exit remains sealed and you must hunt for more nibbley pibbleys.

The game features 11 stages of increasing difficulty, with the stages past 4 becoming brutally hard. But the difficulty of the game is such that you never feel that you are killed unfairly, and part of the fun of the game is finding the easiest way to clear each stage. None-the-less, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll is an extremely challenging, yet oddly addictive, hybrid action puzzle title.

Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll added another dimension to the gameplay with multiplayer co-op, something not often seen in puzzle games of the era. With a second player working to clear stages, the mode adds an additional element of strategy– trying to keep both snakes well fed makes the co-op more competitive than co-operative at times. Success, however, is determined by having both players finish each level, so it is imperative that you strike the correct balance.

If you manage to make it to the end of the game, you’re treated to a screen hinting at a sequel called Snakes in Space. Though such a sequel was never released, a portable version did see the light of day on Nintendo’s GameBoy. However, the gameplay style was altered from an isometric puzzle game to a side-scrolling platformer, killing off much of the charm and challenge that made the original so special.

If you are looking for something different, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll is a true gem, and is worthy of a thorough play-through even today. The addicting, fast paced gameplay and bright, colourful environments make this a high watermark in the NES’s game library worth the revisit.

That habit led to my introduction to Crystalis, which I remembered really liking, but when the time came for the game to return to the store it fell away to new anticipation – would the next game to come home be another Crystalis, or merely a Captain Comic?

Crystalis must have left an impression on me, because later in life, being a grown up and able to pick my own games, my thoughts drifted back to that particular weekend, necessitating a trip to my local video game haunt to find out if my memory was playing tricks on me.

It wasn’t long into that experiment that my appreciation for Crystalis grew exponentially. By this point I had slugged my way through a fair (and financially reasonable) chunk of the Nintendo Entertainment System library, and suffice to say I have a fairly accurate barometer for what is good and what is terrible when it comes to NES games – let it be known that Crystalis is exceptional.

I absorbed more of the story this time around, playing as an unnamed hero who regains consciousness after being in a cryogenic sleep for a century.

Even though he’s lost his memory, he isn’t long discovering that he was placed in cryostasis just prior to the onset of a global thermonuclear war. Players awaken to a world in which, due to the war, all technology has been lost and life has reverted back to a medieval state. The world is overrun with monsters and mutants, and primitive magic is the only powerful weapon man possesses.

You are primarily guided in your quest by four wise men, who believe you to be the hero from the past prophesied to destroy the evil Draygonia Empire – it seems the Empire has been using its military in an attempt to seize a mysterious floating tower. According to myth, this floating tower houses an array of weapons built by the early survivors of the apocalyptic war. Those who constructed the tower and its weapon system intended it to be used to prevent a future cataclysm, but it is Emperor Draygon’s intent to use it to dominate the world.

The only way to defeat the Draygonia Empire is to obtain the Swords of Wind, Fire, Water and Thunder and combine them to defeat the power Emperor Draygon.

Confusing at times? Yes – but what 8-bit game isn’t when it tries to shoe-horn a cohesive story in amongst blocky character sprites and color palette limitations?

As you progress through the game you acquire different magic spells while accomplishing tasks and advancing your stats in typical RPG fashion – you receive these spells and abilities from the aforementioned four wise men, as well as various other NPCs you encounter along the way.

The overarching goal is to obtain the fore-mentioned elemental swords, and their additional power-ups. The power-ups, when equipped, grant you special abilities when the sword is charged. These include the ability to use the Sword of Fire to melt ice bricks and use the Sword of Water to create water bridges over streams and rivers.

Crystalis can best be described as the perfect marriage between The Legend of Zelda and Ys: The Vanished Omens. Developed and published by SNK, Crystalis combined the frenetic pacing of Ys with the free-range, top-down vastness of Zelda. Much like Zelda, you battle enemies in real-time on a world map, but you can also enter towns in which you stay at inns, interact with NPCs, and purchase items and armor. Add to that an exceptional musical score and an elemental magic system that lends itself perfectly to dungeon puzzle crawling and you have what seems to be a mash-up of classic action RPGs.

Playing the game again was like finding a priceless painting in your attic – had it been here the whole time, right under my nose?

I still hold fast that Crystalis serves as the definitive old school action RPG. It is the game that Zelda 2: Link’s Adventure should have been. The weapons, the magic swords and magic spells – it all works so well within the context of the ultra-fast, if some-what repetitive combat system. Loose controls? They just take some getting used to and you’ll have no idea what you were even thinking an hour in.

The best thing about Crystalis, which can be said for very few Nintendo games, is that the story grabs hold and drives the game forward.

I ended up caring about these characters, these blocky avatars – intrigued by the mysterious ones, infuriated at the traitors, and threatened by those most sinister.

I catch myself thinking about what will happen next when I put down the controller and pull back the curtain to my real life. After all; retro or not, 8-bits or true-to-life texture models, isn’t that what video games are supposed to do? Engage you?

Now with an introductory paragraph in the usual review style out of the way, let me tell you a story about a young married couple that one day found themselves immersed in the claws of a harmless, even charming looking videogame.

We’d been married for about four months when my wife one day needed to go back to work during the afternoon to help organize an event. As she was to be gone for the next 2-3 hours I decided to turn on the Wii and see what I could download from the Virtual Console to kill some short amount of time, since we had made dinner plans for later. I started browsing games by console, starting with the NES, SNES and N64, because I figured since those were consoles I actually owned there were better odds of discovering a game I wouldn’t later regret buying.

Still, no such luck was to be had, I couldn’t find the type of game that would be easy to turn off when it was time to leave later – if you’re wondering exactly what I mean, I was at that time playing titles like Toki Tori on WiiWare at the Hard levels, which is definitely not a game you can stop thinking of on short notice, especially when you’ve found your intellect challenged again and again by the Slimy Sewer Hard 4 level.

Still searching through titles, I suddenly came upon one that grabbed my attention and seemed to cover all of my requirements, Devil’s Crush for the TurboGrafx (TG-16 among friends and relatives). Away went 600 Wii (soon to be called Nintendo) Points and in return a classic pinball game (a cult hit I might add) had been placed inside my Wii’s Channels (no SD Card Channel back then). Unfortunately my session was interrupted before it started when my boss called needing urgent information and a few hours of extra work.

To make a long story short, all of this led to me finally getting a chance to sit down with the game at the same time that my wife returned home. Without looking at the screen she asked about what I was playing, so I explained how virtual console worked, which was a new concept for her at the time, and mentioned the TurboGrafx, which she had never heard of. I commented on how great it was to be able to download one of the best games for said console and have fun with a legendary pinball game, at which point her eyes had widened and her only question was “a pinball game you say?”

She sat next to me and watched me play for a minute or two while I explained to her how the controls worked, and then out of nowhere the Wiimote left my hands and never returned. It was me now who was watching her play Devil’s Crush, over and over, while she learned to make her way through the bonus levels, change the face in the middle of the board while at the same time trying to get rid of all the skeletons dancing around it, and of course give the evil-eye to that skull on the right of the screen that laughs every time a ball is lost.

Three hours went by before I knew it.

It was almost like watching someone in a trance, or someone being absorbed by an inexplicable out of body experience. And maybe like witnessing a car crash, I was equally helpless to stop watching. I knew my wife played with an NES and SNES during her childhood, but it was mostly with Mario games and Tetris. I learned that day that pinball held a special place in her life – and that we apparently weren’t going out to dinner anymore, which would come in handy in the future when I was the one absorbed by a game and wasn’t ready for dinner.

This went on for a couple of weeks, an hour or two each day the Wii belonged to her, sometimes at night before she went to sleep since it helped her relax, which I can relate to. I was quite happy to see her embrace what is, most of the time, just MY hobby, but at the same time wondered when I would get a chance to take a shot at it again.

I want to download Alien Crush Returns on WiiWare, I really do. But it will either have to be during a day when I know she’ll have a lot of work and won’t come home until late at night, or risk being thanked for downloading the game and then sitting there watching her have a go for the rest of the day. Thankfully she hasn’t seemed to notice the Wii copy of Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection in my games drawer yet.

You’re watching MTV, where music videos are still played, and Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” comes on. Bruce is rocking out on stage but… he keeps making eyes at this somewhat androgynous brunette in a sleeveless t-shirt. Then, during The Big Man’s sax solo, The Boss actually pulls her up on stage for a brief, intimate, and somewhat awkward dance. And thus the world was introduced to Courtney Cox; she of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Scream and Friends fame. From those dubious beginnings, a long and fruitful career blossomed.

For two of the N64’s most well-known anthropomorphic platform heroes, the beginning was almost as humble.

The year was 1997.

The pluckiest member of the Kong clan, Diddy, had developed quite a cache for himself with a series of successful games on the Super Nintendo and Game Boy, and the developers at Rare hoped to capitalize on the chimp’s achievements by bringing him to the big time. That meant giving him a titular role on a next-gen console; a racing game in 64 glorious bits.

Now, rather than populate Diddy’s game with the same familiar apes and baddies from the Donkey Kong Country games, a whole new vibrant cast of assorted creatures was brought in for Diddy Kong Racing. These creatures would go on to become staples in hit games for the N64 for the rest of the decade and beyond.

Who could forget creatures like Tipsy Mouse, Timber Tiger, and Bumper Badger? I’m only kidding of course.

While Rare might have plucked all of these characters out of obscurity (onto the world stage, so to speak) for Diddy Kong Racing – only two of the new characters ever went on to star in games of their own: Banjo and Conker.

It was the diligent honey bear who took the reins in his own adventure first, in 1998, alongside a backpack dwelling bird in a game called Banjo-Kazooie.

Where do I start in describing the dynamic duo that is Banjo and Kazooie?

Their games for the N64 (including the original and the sequel Banjo-Tooie) are a little more immersive than the previous titles I’ve reviewed in this Refresh Rate section, so I’ll have to start with the basics.

I recall these games as being so playable for quite a variety of reasons. They’re filled with cheeky dialogue, immense and diverse environments, fiendish villains and noble allies – and they were just the antidote for gamers who had grown tired of the same old characters again and again in the Super Mario franchise.

As long as I’m comparing Banjo and Mario, I think it’s worth looking at their attacks. For almost the first ten years of his reign, the only thing Mario had going for him was a good solid jump, and the occasional fire flower or raccoon tail power up.

But right out of the gate, in their first adventure together, Banjo and Kazooie presented players with some real options for bowling over or otherwise tearing into the evil witch Gruntilda’s henchmen.

Standing still, you’ve got your basic Banjo paw swipe, but you can also have Kazooie unleash a flurry of pecks from your back pack; you can crouch down and have her perform a battering ram ‘beak barge’ technique, or cough up any number of projectile eggs; running, Banjo can roll right through some opponents with a fearsome somersault of death – and these are just the attacks readily available to the player early in the game, without even going into the many items and moves learned later on.

Of course, there are also a few things the bear and bird owe to the portly plumber (the act of collecting magical golden trinkets to advance to further worlds; worlds that include watery caverns, treacherous quicksand-filled deserts, haunted houses, and snowy winter wonderlands prominently featuring snowmen… to name a few).

If there’s another thing I should mention in discussing Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie it’s that, well, they’re both kind of benign aren’t they?

The plot of the original is basically that of a Disney fairy tale, where Banjo’s sister is kidnapped by a witch who hopes to steal her beauty – and the danger is pretty light-hearted, with Banjo basically guffawing like Goofy whenever he dies. In the sequel you get the added weight of Bottles dying, but even the problems brought on by that are neatly fixed at the game’s conclusion. Even though Kazooie can be sort of a ball buster and troublemaker, the game is squarely within the ‘G’ rating bracket.

Conker’s Bad Fur Day, released in early 2001, was a different story. In it the player experienced things like actual verbal dialogue that you could hear, raunchy and gory action, and a few well-executed movie spoofs and genre send-ups – in many cases for the first time in a console platformer. And the ending was far from a fairy tale. Yes, for these reasons, Conker brings with it some fond memories.

Now let me remind you of some of the crappier parts.

For all of the funny bits of dialogue delivered in cartoony accents, there’s also a load of tedious cut scenes between an evil panther king that sounds like Dr. Claw, and a strange weasel professor who’s a mix of Dr. Strangelove and Megavolt from Darkwing Duck.

There’s so much going on in these scenes, but I still just wish I could skip them altogether – the game would seriously not be affected by their removal.

The evil Professor Von Kripplespak is a groveling servant of the Panther King in public, clumsily bowing to his every whim, but behind the king’s back, Von Kripplespak is developing things like anti-gravity chocolate and an army of robotic teddy bears. For all his apparent scientific proficiency, when the king breaks a leg on his throne-side table, the best solution the professor can come up with is to use a red squirrel in place of a leg… rather than, you know, a piece of wood of an appropriate length. It’s barely a chuckle-worthy gag (that the scientist and king are too inept to figure out the simplest solution, thereby causing all means of problems for our protagonist) but for some reason it’s drawn out across several excruciating cutscenes at the opening of the game that the player is forced to endure.

They may have been speaking in irritating “wah” and “screech” sounds, but at least when Banjo and Grunty were jawing away at each other you could speed that business up to get back to playing.

Looking back, I think Conker could have greatly benefitted from some sort of dialogue options system; something that would allow players to control some of what their foul-mouthed avatar was saying, thereby keeping them more invested in the surreal misadventures of the jacketed squirrel at their control.

Conker starts out with some fairly basic and unimpressive attacks, a frying pan for melee combat, and a slingshot for some terribly inaccurate ranged attacks, but the weak weaponry is quickly improved with gusto as the player is handed a shotgun from the hands of the Grim Reaper himself for the zombie episode, not to mention a pair of SMGs for the war against the Tediz, and an equally impressive arsenal in the Matrix send-up.

I still appreciate the playful toying Conker does with platformer conventions, like including magical ‘context sensitive buttons’ that provide the player with whatever they need at that particular moment, and I also like how Rare changed the cute squirrel from Diddy Kong Racing to the swearing, scheming opportunist fish-out-of-water that showed up in Conker; but I must also point out a disturbing theme that stretches from Conker’s Bad Fur Day all the way to Banjo-Tooie.

I sense an obsession with fecal matter. While Banjo is forced to speed through a sewer clearing out renegade… ‘clinkers’ in his second adventure, Conker is forced to roll up his sleeves and feed prune juice to a number of ill-fated cows in order to expedite their digestion, thus benefiting some wise-talking dung beetles. After he’s done that, Conker is awarded a doo-doo ball of his own to roll around and generally wreak havoc.

Real mature, Rare. Real mature.

Consider this your time machine.

At their best, they drew fans to the comic book racks, toy shelves, TV screens, and even to the box office for three live action films in the early nineties. They had their moment in the spotlight, strutting on stage with Vanilla Ice singing “Go Ninja, Go Ninja, Go!” – before being plunged into very much the same obscurity as Vanilla Ice.

A recent animated feature put the heroes in half-shells back out on the streets, but, well-received as it was, it and any subsequent films will never be able inject the same kind of freshness into the series that it enjoyed in the late eighties and early nineties. Today, they’re competing against the Transformers and Smurfs and Thundercats of the world for a chance at the purse strings of nostalgic North Americans; not as glossy or as fresh as characters in the Pixar universe or the heroes from the Marvel and DC worlds who have recently been getting their own big budget Hollywood makeovers.

So, it is in the spirit of looking back in time that I take a look back at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time, a 1992 Konami title for the SNES which came out at the plateau of the Turtles’ presence in the pop culture arena. By Turtles IV, not only the heroes, but also the game’s villains (from Shredder to Krang and Baxter Stockman, right down to the Foot Clan) were all well established in the form of action figures, not to mention comic books and TV shows.

In a world where flying space aliens are working in cahoots with masked Ninjutsu warlords, an origin story for the six-foot bi-pedal katana-wielding turtles committed to saving the day seems somewhat irrelevant.

And honestly, in 1992, no origin story was needed. Some household pet turtles had been mutated by some ooze and raised underground by a martial arts master who was also mutated… into a rat for some reason, and that was that. So it’s fitting that at the outset of Turtles IV, there is no origin story – just a heist and a call to action.

Krang swoops in while April O’Neil is making a non-descript newscast in front of the Statue of Liberty, before proceeding to make off with the 150 foot statue. Only one team of mutated teen turtles, who happen to be watching the broadcast from their sewer hideout, can put the terrible wrong right.

The player then fights through three seemingly disconnected New York environments, facing three seemingly disconnected minor bosses, before reaching the Technodrome, the first encounter with Shredder, and the first real challenge of the game. In order to defeat Shredder in this meeting, the player must hurl foot soldiers into Shredder’s control room, which, in a unique and memorable flourish, is located in the extreme foreground of the action. The turtles literally appear to throw the baddies out of the TV set; that act in itself seems to reflect the youthful exuberance the turtles represented in the early nineties.

But, besides that, the first Shredder fight itself was sort of a train wreck. Shredder’s profile, and some of the weapons he used to attack the player, and his health gauge, all ate up valuable real estate on the screen making combat on the Technodrome floor against the constantly re-spawning crowd of foot soldiers somewhat chaotic.

However, it was that first chaotic clusterfuck at the Technodrome that made what happened next all the more worthwhile. Revealing some heretofore unknown mystical power he has at his disposal, Shredder somehow sends the turtles back in time. All the way back.

The next thing Leo, Donnie, Raph, and Michelangelo know, they are in the year 250 000 000 BC, groovin’ with dinosaurs, mudmen, and, for some reason, the Foot Clan.

Apparently when an enemy boss is defeated in the past, the turtles cause a flux in Shredder’s time warp and are transported ahead in time to an era slightly closer to the present… although this is never explained and I just sort of made it up based on my experience with the game… and even my rationalization of the game’s plot fails to explain the pair of levels in the future where the turtles duel with Krang.

At any rate, after 250 000 000 BC, the turtles find themselves swashbuckling on the deck of a remarkably long pirate ship in 1350 AD. I always thought that was kind of an uncomfortable leap – from dinosaurs to pirates – but I guess in the interest of brevity, ancient Egypt and the fall of the Roman empire had to take a back seat.

After 1350, the turtles take on the old west on a steam engine circa 1885, facing off against Killer Croc.. err, Leatherhead.

An amazingly accurate portrayal of what life will resemble in 2020 – ie. hover boards – follows, before a trip to deep space, and the obligatory final confrontation.

It is a thoroughly enjoyable game with a fun sense of humour, cool visuals, an achievable difficulty arc, and excellent multiplayer replayability.

Friendships can be made or broken over the course of the game, as brotherhood is put to the test based on who needs pizza power-ups the most.

Apparently I’m not the only who fondly recalled Turtles IV as, last summer, a 3D remake of the game was released by Ubisoft and made available online for XBLA and PSN. The remake took the original arcade version of the game as its inspiration – not Konami’s eventual reworked SNES port – so it’s not an exact match of the game I’ve just described.

Some major differences actually exist.

The remake lacks the Rat King at the end of the sewer level, replaced by a frustrating onslaught of pizza monsters. The first Technodrome stage is also nixed, effectively making it pointless to ever throw the enemy into the screen, and, to an extent, removing the sense of satisfaction one got for making it to the time travel levels at all.

A number of other bosses differ from the SNES version. Bebop and Rocksteady become Tokka and Rahzar, and Slash gets replaced by Clayface.. err, ‘Cement Man’. Overly dark colour filters and new musical arrangements were some other criticisms that lovers of the original cited after playing the remake, but the changes aren’t all bad. April O’Neil, for instance, became a total fox in the revamped version.

The 3D graphics in the remake look great, but when players add up all the memories and experiences they had playing the original I think most will find the remake lacking.

Even a stunning rendering of a giant three-dimensional Krang can’t compare to the crude 2D image of Leonardo hopping up and down on a surf board, clutching his foot and whelping, “My toe! My toe!”

Arthur begins in a classic iron suit of armor, purely utilitarian and consistent with the mythical prehistoric defenders of Britain, but he can uncover several upgrades that become increasingly more ornate and regal. The suit upgrades also magnify the power of whichever weapon Arthur happens to be holding onto; he starts with a lance but other options encountered through the game include speedy daggers, frightful bows, and useless torches. No matter how terrific Arthur appears in his shiny armor, a single hit from an enemy instantly rips our hero from his protective shell, leaving him to carry on in nothing but his skivvies.

But aren’t suits of armor notoriously hard to put on and take off? One wonders if perhaps Arthur expected his quest to the princess to be a rather lackadaisical journey, and designed his suits of armor accordingly, so that when he finally reached his damsel he could more speedily disrobe and make with the obligatory reward sex.

Yes, I have fond memories of braving zombie-filled cemeteries and haunted frigates in an attempt to rescue the beautiful princess, so wrongfully plucked from her castle in the chilling opening cinematic. I have just as many memories of never coming remotely close to doing so.

There are a few reasons I was forever destined to suffer the blue balls of defeat at the hands of Super Ghouls ‘n Ghosts. I’m inclined to say that the first was the awkward double jump employed by Arthur. In regular practice the jump boosted the height and length of Arthur’s jumping range, allowing him to reach platforms that would otherwise be unreachable.

However, if Arthur’s first jump were vertical, i.e., not to the left or right, the laws of the game dictated that his second jump must also remain perfectly vertical.

I cursed this feature, which I perceived as a design flaw each time it caused me to plummet to a watery grave in either of the opening two levels.

The second reason is one I suspect confounded many young gamers over the years: you had to play through the damn game twice in order to beat it.

Call it tradition, as this was the exact same fork-in-the-eye treated to players of Capcom’s 1988 arcade game Ghouls ‘n Ghosts – or, just call it what it was, a way to encourage kids to pump more quarters into arcade machines.

Upon defeating the two hairy pig fellows at the top of the demon Sardius’ castle, the player is instructed by an apparition of the princess that only a magical bracelet that she’s hidden somewhere has the power to defeat Sardius. Sorry Mario, our princess is in another castle. Except this time it’s not another castle. And the bracelet you need is just right behind you (but I’ll explain that in a moment).

In the mean time, the player must return to the first world in order to open up a chest while wearing magical golden armor and pick up a dumb bracelet that, despite possessing the unique and formidable ability to kill a 50 foot demon, suffers from a pitiful range of attack and is not even potent enough to kill some standard baddies in one hit.

A peculiar design choice has it that, so long as the player avoids cracking open chests on their second run through the game, they’re not forced to pick up the bracelet, and can continue using their faster, better weapons as long as they’d like.

Truly skilled players can actually hold off on grabbing the bracelet until the last level, just a few screens away from where they were previously told to return to the beginning to find the fucking bracelet that they just picked up about fifty feet away in that very same locale.

Speaking of locales, I always got the feeling that Capcom jumped the shark on places for a knight to fight ‘ghouls ‘n ghosts’ midway through the game and was forced to include otherworldly locations such as the ‘Maze of Death’ and ‘The Ghoul’s Stomach’.

Don’t get me wrong, considering the constraints of the time I think this game represents some ingenious boundary stretching for the side-scrolling, platforming genre.

The use of axis-shifting and direction-altering in the ‘Maze of Death’ level took the lemons of constantly moving in one direction for an entire level and stirred it into some pretty sweet lemonade… but is that surreal nightmare really where you’d expect a knight to fight ghouls ‘n ghosts? I suppose nobody would expect an Italian plumber to be bopping crotchety turtles amongst the clouds either, but I just thought it warranted mentioning how silly the setting of this game became after a couple of incredibly memorable early levels.

It’s hard to imagine games being made today the way Capcom was developing them in the eighties and nineties with an arcade-dwelling audience in-mind. What if, upon reaching the pinnacle of Ganondorf’s castle in Ocarina of Time, the player was told that the only weapon that would allow for the destruction of the evil Gerudo prince was located back in Kokiri Forest where the quest began, and where the player would have almost certainly seen it on his first go round? It would have pissed off a bunch of righteously angry 12-year-olds, you can be sure about that.

Bomberman is a bit different though – he actively invades habitats just to destroy whatever is living there. It’s almost like some sort of commentary on the world – he is humanity personified, and he has a habit of seeking out new lands and exploding whatever gets in his way. Or he’s just running around and doing what most of us would do if we were given access to an unlimited amount of bombs.

Either way, he’s a pretty entertaining guy, but I can’t help but think that Bomberman is also kind of a jerk.

Imaginary Interviews #2