Get some cake...it's the N64's birthday!

Yep, the Nintendo 64 is officially ten years old. Happy birthday, little fella!

I actually remember the first time I had picked up my N64. Summer 1996. I think I was still living at my house at the time, enjoying my PlayStation and engaging in multiplayer rounds of Twisted Metal. I remember getting a call from a friend who told me that a game store had a used import N64 in stock, along with Wave Race and Super Mario 64, so I said, "Screw it" and headed down to pick it up. A few hours later, I was engulfed in N64 greatness.

I managed to depart with my import N64 before the US version came out, and getting some reasonable dollars back on it to go towards my reservation. I don't really own that many import systems, aside from my blue skeletal Sega Saturn and the white PS2 unit I'm going to be ordering fairly soon here. But I had a great time with the N64, and when I picked up the US model, I remember playing it for hours on end along with Mr. Boyd, especially Mario.

There were a lot of fun times that I had with the N64. I remember playing Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for several hours and finally getting drawn in to a first-person shooter; I remember my countless multiplayer sessions of Goldeneye with Mr. Boyd, and his accusations I was "peeking" at his screen to get his location (and I still insist I didn't); I remember finally getting an Ultra combo pulled off in Killer Instinct Gold; and then there's the racing games, in a league by themselves.

Mario Kart 64...ahh, those were the days. Four-player racing madness across some beautiful tracks, all while firing off red shells and trying to keep first place. Then there was F-Zero X, still one of my favorite racing games to this date (even if F-Zero GX easily eclipses it). Beetle Adventure Racing, Ridge Racer 64, and San Francisco Rush round out this category with ease. I love all those games.

Man, those were the days, weren't they? When the next generation was just starting to get its feet wet and microtransactions were a gleam in someone else's eye. The early N64 days are still ones of great rememberance, sort of like the first time you picked up a Dreamcast and played Soul Calibur or the first time you really, really, REALLY got into Symphony of the Night on the PlayStation. Sigh...to live those days over again...

At least the days are coming back around. Between the XBLA service, the PS3 Network service (well, OK, not so much that), and the Virtual Console, the good ol' days continue to surface around the face of the next generation. I'm looking forward to seeing what these services do over the next year, and the classic fun they bring with them. Sure, I'll drop a few bucks all over again, but, hey, anything to relive glory's past while still staying in the present, right?

Anyway, happy birthday, N64. I know a lot of people didn't care for your limitations or kids' games (Pokemon Snap...bleah), but I love ya all the same. You brought plenty of great gaming experiences with you, from the elegance of Mario 64 (which truly excelled the 3-D platformer) to the introduction of Smash Bros. (still a favorite at the GameDaily offices to the fun flying of Rogue Squadron. Hell, I especially love the fact you got one of the most mature-themed games out there, the raunchy yet delightful Conker's Bad Fur Day. Still love that game, if just for the Great Mighty Poo. "How about some scat, you little twat!"

Hehe, alright, that does it for my look back, see you guys later. Go get an N64 and live it up a little!

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Doom-ed from the start...

What the hell. I've decided to start a Modojo blog. Why not?

Hey all.

So...how about that X06, eh? While Killer Instinct X didn't get revealed like I thought it would, there was still plenty on hand for the event. TWO new Halo projects (one being handled by...Peter Jackson?!), Banjo Kazooie, Project Gotham Racing 4, more Gears of War, Assassin's Creed (complete with the lovely Ms. Jade Raymond giving the presentation), and more...

Then, of course, they announced Doom out of left field.

Not the greatest first-person shooter in the world to me, mind you...especially in this day and age of Resistance: Fall of Man and Call of Duty 2. But, eh, screw it, I felt like downloading it and getting my online frag on. And it's not that bad, actually. The game looks prehistoric compared to today's stuff, but it moves fast and has plenty of action going for it. And I love the dual analog controls. Feels more natural this way, I think.

And, hey, there are other versions of Doom out there that didn't fare so well. Here now is a brief overview of the other versions.

Doom on PlayStation- I prefer this version the best out of all the ports on older systems, not only because of its lightning fast frame rate but because of the comfortable feel. True, you can't play online (grumble), but it's probably the best offline version out there.

Doom for Sega Saturn- My God, what a heaping, flaming pile of garbage this port is. Get this. The screen isn't full size, cut off around the corners; the controls are sloppy; the graphics are glitched out (even at smaller size); the frame rate is hideous. And zero SegaNet support. Yeah, suckage.

Doom for the Sega 32X- Eh, not bad. This game isn't exactly my cup of tea when it comes to a cartridge format, but this wasn't too bad for showcasing what the 32X was capable of...as little as it was capable of. Moved pretty fast and controlled OK. Made great use of the six-button controller.

Doom for the SNES- Surprisingly decent. Nothing amazing by any means (you try cramming a classic 3-D shooter into the SNES and come away with something), but playable and somewhat likable. Lack of online play sucked, but, hey, at least it wasn't a total mess like Wolfenstein 3-D. Let me hunt the mutant...er, rats!

I would talk about the PC stuff and Final Doom for the PlayStation, but you get my drift. There have been many ports but there's only so much they could do without online play. That's why Doom seems to stand a good chance on XBLA, what with deathmatch options and old-school goodness with demons from Hell. Yes, I said "goodness with demons from Hell". Yeesh.

So get online and I'll see you there. Frag you later!

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The Right and Wrong of Handheld Pinball

Back in the old days, the only way to really savor a Game Boy game at its finest wasn't to adjust any sort of contrast or even what kind of screen to have for it (after all, it only existed in spinach green upon its introduction in 1989), but to rather get some good light on the screen. Be it indoor, hanging off the back of the system like some kind of magnetic desk lamp, or outdoors, playing in the middle of a summer afternoon while I awaited my junior year in high school, light was important. And it was important for two primary reasons for the time- Tetris, a game I played rather addictively, and a little known game called Revenge of the Gator.

Revenge of the Gator was a three-level pinball game themed around alligators (the cute kind) and made by the folks at HAL Laboratories, the makers of the earlier NES pinball game Rollerball and Kirby's Adventure. The game was simple in design, and didn't even have any sort of complicated table ala High Speed or Pinbot. But, man, did it give me hours of fun. I kept trying to rack up a high score with each new round, only to watch my ball eventually land at the bottom and get swallowed by his ridiculous one-eyed gator, hanging around like a puppy dog waiting for scraps from the dinner table. It really was a good time, and it kind of made me think.

Think, that is, about what makes a handheld pinball game good and what makes it absolutely suck. It can't really be in the perspective, because I know that Revenge of the Gator uses a top-down view just like Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies, two utterly useless pinball games from GameTek. Perhaps it's just in the fun that such a game delivers. Neither of GameTek's Pinball games were that fulfilling to me. Sure, they had themes, but the designs seemed rather weak and they really came across without a desire to be played, you know? A good game designer knows that they need to have something to not only attract someone at first, but keep them hooked for the long haul, maybe even years down the road. Pinball Dreams kept me hooked for exactly 43 minutes on the Game Boy and the Game Gear COMBINED. Pinball Fantasies took even less than that.

But Gator I stuck with, and still own to this very day. It was stuck in a cluttered drawer with a bunch of other stuff from yesteryear, including such games as Flipull and, of course, Tetris. I had myself a little festival of Game Boy playing the other day on my GBA, just for the hell of it, and loved playing them again. But it's Gator that really had me going for a little over an hour, and now it's out of the drawer and sitting back in an active collection. Now that's a good pinball game.

Hopefully, the new pinball games on the rise, including one for N-Gage (Mile High Pinball) and Pinball Hall of Fame for the PSP, I'm sure, will manage to addict like Gator did and not fall in the same rut as GameTek's faulted offerings. I guess we'll just have to wait it out and see if it's something to flip out to, or if we have to resort to the good ol' days of just tracking down a pinball machine and popping a quarter in.

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When You Want Dragon's Lair Done Right!

When it comes to the subject of old-school gaming, I'm all over it quicker than Ted Kennedy topples a Washington bar. I've been into it for some time, and, over the years, I've garnered a few favorites that stick out in my mind. One of those favorites is Dragon's Lair, a 1983 arcade game that's basically an interactive cartoon at best. Produced by the folks at Cinematronics and put together by animators Gary Goldman and Don Bluth, the game turned out to be a whopping success, as gamers would lead the speechless Dirk the Daring through a castle of traps and monsters in order to face the evil Singe the Dragon and rescue the darling Princess Daphne from captivity.

Hey, Dragon's Lair and I go way back, back to the days of a Celebrity Sports Center tournament in '83 and me actually getting told by my dad that he was worried about me spending so much time on it and the homemade guide my friend Steve made. I told him not to worry, as I would eventually move on to Space Ace, released the same year from the same team. Dragon's Lair II: Timewarp came out in 1991 and rekindled my love for the franchise, and immediately solidified itself as a superb sequel with even bigger scenarios and a more dramatic conclusion.

Ah, but ask me how the home versions of Dragon's Lair fared. Whatever. In 1983, Colecovision attempted to release the game in all its arcade glory with their ADAM tape system, and it failed miserably, shortly followed by the demise of the gaming market. Nintendo came back years later, introducing the NES and Game Boy, and they too would see Dragon's Lair come around in some kind of ruptured form. The NES version, produced by Sony Imagesoft, was completely unplayable, attempting to recreate the game's scenarios into a side-scrolling format and completely forgetting to add play control or appealing graphics. The result? Bomb.

But then we come to the Game Boy version, also by Sony, which took a different approach. Instead of focusing on the swordplay that the arcade game is known for, it instead let Dirk travel through level after level, collecting gems and avoiding traps. Sure, it was more fun than the Dragon's Lair game on the NES, but it simply wasn't Dragon's Lair. Collecting blocks is not exactly Dirk the Daring's forte', if you catch my drift.

So would anyone do Dragon's Lair right for the handheld format? Or any format, for that matter? Well, Digital Leisure did release a DVD version of the arcade classic that's pristine, as well as a 20th anniversary arcade game to mark the occasion. But the real surprise came from Digital Eclipse and Capcom, who, in 2001, did the unthinkable. They reproduced the arcade feeling into a handheld format- for the Game Boy Color, no less.

Dragon's Lair was created by Digital Eclipse's team back in 2000, and it showed the dedication the company was putting into the project. The game closely followed the format of the arcade game, recreating the scenarios and allowing you control of your movements. Go the wrong way, a buzz indicated so. Go the right way, and a sort of "token" sound indicated you could continue. But the way the graphics were done, at the time, were astounding, as even the crumbling Dirk skeleton animation made the cut. Arcade perfect it wasn't, but it came closer than any Dragon's Lair port before it, that's for damn sure.

Dragon's Lair, to this day, remains one of my favorite Game Boy Color games, and I'll probably never get rid of it, keeping it alongside my Dragon's Lair lunchbox and autographed poster for some time to come. Granted, I'll beat it to death every time, but sometimes you just have to have an uninterrupted arcade experience in the palm of your hand to reassure our progress. Plus those Giddy Goons are fun to cut up.

See you next time on Into the Past!

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