Super Nintendo #8: The 7th Saga

Developer: Produce

Publisher: Enix

Release Date: 4-23-93

(Does anyone else think this cover makes it look like the hero is turning into a giant praying mantis?)

The 7th Saga is a game with quite the reputation, or at least as much of a reputation as a thirty-year-old game that nobody's ever heard of can have. It's a little-known RPG that is remembered mainly for being very hard. It's often thought of as the most difficult RPG on Super Nintendo, an epic grind that takes an hour or more of fighting the weakest enemies just to make it to the next town. Of course, the game's relative obscurity means that this reputation is overblown. More people have heard about this game than have played it. It's a game I have owned for years and only played a little bit out of fear. I didn't want to get twenty or thirty hours in only to realize that it was going to be too difficult to finish. I finally worked up the courage to actually attempt a playthrough, and I hate to sound boastful, but it really wasn't that hard. Now I've probably spent more time in my life playing RPGs than any other form of entertainment, but I don't think I'm that good at them. There are countless games I have started that got frustrating and I put on hold. If I could actually finish all the RPGs I've started, my backlog would shrink by 100 games or more. I am much better at enjoying them that I am at finishing them. So, take it from a true mediocre enthusiast when I say that The 7th Saga isn't as difficult as people say it is. Don't be afraid to give it a try. I've you're an obsessive RPG fan like I am, you will probably find something to like.

(This game (contains too many) rocks!)

I can see why people talk about the difficulty so much, because it really stands out in an otherwise traditional turned-based RPG. Of course, I love traditional RPGs so I'm not going to complain about that specifically. If you have played any than you know the drill. You visit towns, travel between them while fighting just an absurd number of monsters, save up to get better equipment, explore dungeons, and fight some screen-filling bosses. I'd say this is one of the most straightforward of all Super Nintendo RPGs. There aren't many side quests and it's hard to do anything out of order. Mostly this is a good thing. I think I played through it so quickly because I always knew what I was going to get. Honestly, for such a notorious game I was surprised how quickly I got into it. The developers certainly got that part right.

The most unique aspect of The 7th Saga, at least by 1993 standards, is its odd cast of characters. At the beginning of the game, you pick one of seven characters with mostly traditional RPG roles. All the non-chosen characters are sent out on the same quest, so you will encounter them along your journey. 
This doesn't always go well. There is room for another party member and sometimes they will want to join you. Other times they will fight you for your runes. I think other times they just say hello, but that's not very interesting. I think it's the character battles that is the most infamous aspect of the game. If they want to fight you in some random town than losing is no big deal. That's why they created the reset button. However, there is at least one moment where a fight is necessary, and you can't level your way out of it. Your rival levels up with you making the potential battle intimidating to say the least. I got very lucky in my playthrough and was joined by my rival. I sampled some of these battles though and they can be tough. I imagine this is where many players give up. 

(This game does have some random hidden items that make the search command not completely useless for a change)

Still, none of this bothered me too much. My main complaint is how the game looks. I just wrote about how impressed I was by Dragon Warrior managing to look distinct even in 1986. Well, The 7th Saga is the complete opposite side of the scale. I can't imagine an RPG looking more generic than this. It looks like it was made in an early version of RPG Maker. It's a game full of ugly, practically identical towns of grey cobblestones and dusty trails. All the terrain looks the same expect for the obligatory snowy area which is white instead of brown. It's a game where you can't tell if you are in the ruins of an ancient civilization or a typical item shop. There might be some different colors, but the difference between caves, mountain passes, and castles are practically nil. It's disappointing for a Super Nintendo game from 1993 for sure. It doesn't ruin the experience, but I expect better this far into a console's run.

I also think it's funny how deceptive the marketing was. Most of the literature I've seen about this game from the time was along the lines of "it has seven characters to choose from, that means you could play forever with endless combinations." But this isn't Saga Frontier. You can pick a character, but they all experience basically the same quest and there is only one generic ending. It's not a game heavy on plot to begin with. You might encounter some of your companions in different places, but after around the halfway point even this becomes infrequent. I think the second half of the game is basically identical no matter who you pick. It's not like they have much unique dialogue or personalities either. The dialogue is just as generic as the graphics. So, it may be a fun game to play through once, but I don't see much purpose in playing the game seven times. It might've seemed novel in 1993, but it was mostly a marketing gimmick. 

(Get used to the combat screen. You're going to be here a lot)

I hope more than anything that this review takes a bit of the infamy from the game and actually encourages people to play it. I really did have a good time with The 7th Saga, and it's a game I put off playing for a long time. It's not an epic slog that you have to play through seven times. It's a medium-to-difficult game that only requires one good playthrough to experience. It's mostly RPG comfort food that is fun to play even if it's not quite in the upper echelon of SNES RPGs. I love a game with incremental growth. I love the excitement of gaining a level or two and seeing if I am now ready to venture to that next town. The 7th Saga has many of these moments, and it was fun more often than it was frustrating. Sure, the stat gains are minimal in the American version, but levels don't really take that long to gain, and the added difficulty keeps combat from becoming rote. Every time they threw a new wrinkle into the game, like suddenly making the party unable to cast spells, it actually made the game more fun. It may feature cozy gameplay, but they never let you get too comfortable. 

The 7th Saga is coming in at #26 on the overall list which is impressive to say the least. I've played enough games now that I have 87 in the good column. That means that games in the upper third are starting to become actually high quality and not just good for what I have played so far. It's my third best SNES game, but I may be just a bit biased. The top 5 are all RPGs and the bottom three are everything else. I need to play some other types of SNES games. Maybe it's time to start getting to the true classics. Or perhaps it's time to play some dusty old trash that nobody cares about. Anyone know any interesting SNES Games I could try? 

Super Nintendo quality percentage: 5/8 or 62.5%

NES #47: Dragon Warrior

 

Developer: Chunsoft

Publisher: Nintendo

Release Date: August 1989

All these years later and I'm still shocked that all the 8-bit Dragon Quest games made it to America. RPGs were popular on computers, but it took a while for them to gain momentum on consoles. There is a technological reason for this of course, but I think that many RPGs from the 8-bit era hold up. There were many great developers in the 80s and 90s who could get the most out of whatever platform they were working with. It's also no secret that Japan loved them even with less advanced graphics and only two buttons. Having pop-up menus instead of memorizing dozens of keystrokes was apparently not that much of a deterrent. Still, most of Japan's RPGs stayed in Japan with only a few oddballs making it over that didn't exactly set the world on fire. Oh, you're going to send over Deadly Towers but keep the Heracles games for yourself? That's certainly a choice. The best RPG for the NES pre-Dragon Warrior is probably Zelda 2, which is more of a hybrid and is often considered the black sheep of the series despite it being a masterpiece. Seriously, Zelda 2 is great. So, this is where I'm going to give Nintendo some credit. They saw something in the Dragon Quest series and practically forced it to be a hit in America. They polished up an already three-year-old game and when it didn't sell as well as they had hoped gave it away with Nintendo Power subscriptions. It was the third best-selling game for Nintendo in 1989 which likely made it the most well-known RPG in the states until the Final Fantasy games hit Super Nintendo. However, is Dragon Warrior actually a good game? Or does its already old-fashioned gameplay by 1989 standards hold it back even further in 2024? Is it a game that is more important than it is good? Do you even have to ask? Dragon Warrior is a classic.

For the last 25 years Dragon Warrior has been my comfort game. It always cheers me up when I am feeling down. That's because I love RPGs more than anything, and Dragon Warrior is such a textbook RPG that it's infinitely appealing. It's everything I love about the genre condensed into a wonderful retro package. There are basically two things to do in Dragon Warrior: build up your character and explore. The world is fairly small but wide open, and there's not that much in terms of directions. The main way you can tell if you wander into the wrong area is by stumbling upon a monster that is too strong. The quest is laid out at the very beginning of the game and it's about as basic as it gets. There's a princess to be saved and a Dragon Lord to defeat. This is accomplished by solving cryptic clues, collecting some MacGuffins, and of course leveling up. The leveling will probably turn off some gamers, but I love it. For one thing the combat is exciting. There's not much mindless grinding in Dragon Warrior unless of course you want it to take 100 hours. But when I'm fighting monsters that are close to my level I'm constantly having to watch over my character. Death means losing half your gold, so it's best to try to stay as healthy as possible with healing spells and herbs. It's good to stay close to towns, but of course many of the earlier towns are surrounded by weak monsters that quickly become pointless. Equipment gets very expensive very fast, so I'm always trying to find ways to travel as lightly as possible. Buying healing items and wings for fast traveling would makes things easier in the short term, but I'm trying to save up thousands of dollars. This decision making is definitely part of the fun, and it certainly helps illustrate that Dragon Warrior is much more than mindless level grinding.

Of course, it also helps that Dragon Warrior takes place in a fun, vibrant world. For many of us Westerners approaching middle age, Dragon Warrior was our introduction to the art of Akira Toriyama. His lively, instantly recognizable style graced many projects over the years, most famously the Dragon Ball series, but he was one of the most important faces of the Dragon Quest series from the beginning up until his untimely death earlier this year. The cartoony monsters certainly set the game apart from the more grounded visuals of western RPGs. In most games, slimes would just be formless blobs. In Dragon Warrior, however, they are smiling, Hershey Kiss shaped mascots. They're one of the first things you see in the game, and it's no wonder they become so iconic. Actually, many of the cutest and simplest monsters are near the beginning. That's an approach Pokémon would perfect a decade later. The fun visuals contrast nicely with the medieval dialogue. Apparently, Nintendo was trying to make the game more serious, but the knight-speak only makes it funnier. It's a great mix that the series has always kept to a degree. The games are great at never getting too serious or too silly. 

Even the game's more primitive aspects are endearing. I should be annoyed that I have to open up my menu and select a command if I want to talk to someone or climb stairs, but I still find this charming. Maybe it's because there aren't that many people or stairs around so it's not that frequent. I just see it as a fun nod to an earlier time. I'm not as nostalgic as I used to be, but I do get nostalgic for RPG menu screens. The slow pace might turn some people off, but I think it works in context. The relaxed pace and pleasant world help balance out all the stressful battles. I think the only real "this game is old" complaint I have is that locked doors re-lock themselves after you leave an area. Those keys are expensive and can only be carried three-at-a-time, so it can be hard to keep up with which ones I have previously opened. It was still very exciting when I finally found the key store for the first time though. 

No, the minor things don't hurt Dragon Warrior much. I think the only think that could hurt the game's ranking is everything that came out later. Dragon Quest is one of the longest running RPG series, and even with all the spinoff games there is a stunning consistency. The main series doesn't have many black sheep or missteps, so many of the mechanics introduced in Dragon Warrior would be refined and perfected in the years to come. I don't think Dragon Warrior is going to end up being the lowest ranked game in the series, but I do know what's coming and I know just how great some of the games are. 

I played and ranked Dragon Warrior right now as a little reward to myself. I've been stressed lately, and I knew revisiting Dragon Warrior would help. It really is a game near and dear to my heart, and because of this I might overrate it just a bit. You know how I just said it's not even one of the best games in the series? Well now it's my #3 game overall. That's right, I like Dragon Warrior better than The Legend of Zelda. They are both similar games with similar early-NES problems, but for me a game is just better when I can gain levels and buy equipment. I never felt like any time was wasted even if I was somewhat aimless. The Legend of Zelda has a lot of aimless wandering that just doesn't feel as purposeful. Also, Dragon Warrior has better combat. So, the Nintendo dominance at the top of my list continues, and if I decide to play more Dragon Quest games in the near future expect to see a lot more of those too. I foresee good things on the horizon. 

NES Quality Percentage: 23/47 or 48.93%

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G01RKJ7-caaal5lgFfGgPfZRGcqWlv4E3E2E615UYKg/edit?usp=sharing

Atari 2600 #23: Demolition Herby

Developer: Telesys

Publisher: Telesys

Release Date: 1983

Telesys pivoted very quickly from their original strategy of doing uniquely funny games. That's not necessarily a bad thing considering the quality of their first three. Instead, they decided to go with the strategy of so many third-party publishers and just copy an already popular arcade game. The game in question is Amidar. Although not as remembered as some of the other arcade greats, Amidar was one of Konami's most popular and influential early games. It's a Pac-Man influenced game that has the player moving around a grid while collecting dots and filling in squares. It's an addictive game that launched its own subgenre of grid capture games. Pepper II for Colecovision is an excellent example. Atari 2600 saw several variations on the grid capture formula including an official version of Amidar released by Parker Brothers in November of 1982. MobyGames has the release date for Demolition Herby as February of 1983. That certainly sounds like they were trying to cash in on a trend. Thankfully Demolition Herby isn't an exact clone. It makes some changes to the formula which are both positive and negative. At least it keeps up with the Telesys trend of having a funny title, and Don Ruffcorn even used his full name. That's already two points in its favor. Well, metaphorical points anyway. I am not going to start doing a point system for these reviews. 

The biggest difference between Demolition Herby and Amidar is the speed. Amidar is surprisingly slow even in its arcade incarnation. It's a game more about careful planning than twitchy reflexes. Demolition Herby ramps up the speed to an almost frantic pace. The dots are gone making Demolition Herby much more about escaping from danger. You play as the titular Herby being chased by other cars on a perfectly rectangular grid. The goal is to fill in rectangular sections of the grid by driving over all four sides. There are no power-ups to fight off enemies with, but holding down the button will make Herby move even faster. The catch is that turbo mode won't fill in squares and fuel drains faster. If you run out of fuel, you lose a life. The only way to regain fuel is to fill in grid sections. You get a bigger bonus if you fill in two squares at once, and this is basically the whole goal of the game. I appreciate the extra speed, but there is a problem with the design.

Demolition Herby is fast, but this necessitates a somewhat tedious design. Usually, grid capture games will have more varied and interesting maps. Amidar features rectangles of all different sizes and multiple screens. The more varied gameplay helps keep things from geting boring. Demolition Herby features the same shapes set up in the same way forever. This caused me to play every section of every level in basically the same way. Sure, there are enemies to avoid, but they feel more like nuisances than challenges. You can't really do much with them, just speed away. I wish there was some sort of powerup that allowed me to attack the enemies. The games needs about 50% more demolition and 50% less Herby. Alright, so maybe I don't actually have a problem with the amount of Herby. I just want some more variety.

I know that all the Telesys games have been inspired by other games so far, but Demolition Herby is the one that can't hide behind quirky originality. Cosmic Creeps stood out as an original game despite it being mostly a Space Invaders clone. Demolition Herby is a better game than Cosmic Creeps, but the inevitable comparisons to Amidar make the flaws really stand out. I had some fun playing Demolition Herby, but it was a fun that didn't last very long, and I don't think this is a game I am going to take out and play very often when I get the urge to play Atari. Honestly, I liked Fast Food just a little bit better because it was so distinct and had fun graphics. It's that classic battle of burgers vs rectangles. It comes up a lot, but burgers win every time. In this case it's more of a moral victory since they're both stuck in the purple section. They're a couple of middling games coming in at 107 and 108 overall. I can't say what people were doing on Saturday afternoons in 1983 because I wasn't born yet, but I bet there were better things to do than play Demolition Herby. 

Atari Quality Percentage: 9/23 or 39.13%

Atari 2600 #22: Cosmic Creeps

Developer: Telesys

Publisher: Telesys

Release Date: 1982

(At least it has A+ box art)

Oddly this is the second Atari 2600 game I've written about so far that has the word Cosmic in the title and is about futuristic mass transit. That's not something I would have expected. It's not like the word cosmic automatically implies futuristic space busses. Hopefully the other cosmic Atari games explore some different themes. I think I still have about a half dozen to play. Initially I wrote about Cosmic Commuter, which is a game that I played even before I had my own Atari 2600 and therefore has some nostalgia attached to it. For that reason, Cosmic Creeps will always feel like the copycat. That may be a little bit unfair considering Cosmic Creeps is older, but it's hard to top Activision. Actually, Cosmic Creeps is hard to date exactly, and this is one of the things that makes writing about Atari difficult. Nobody was paying that much attention at the time, and so many game companies were gone without a trace before reviews could even appear. I've looked at several sources and they all seem to give different dates for the release of the Telesys games. They might've been released in one big chunk at the end of 1982, or they could've trickled out into 1983. Cosmic Creeps is probably the third game they released, but the serial number implies that it was the second they started working on. I can say that the first three (CocoNuts, Fast Food, and Cosmic Creeps) are very common while the last three (Ram It, Stargunner, and Demolition Herby) are all fairly rare. I'm guessing their first three games didn't sell as well as they expected so they had to cut back on production for the last three. Games like Cosmic Creeps probably didn't give consumers much hope, either. The credits also imply that Cosmic Creeps wasn't thought of very highly. Don Ruffcorn is credited with designing three Telesys games. The other two games have his full name in the manual. In Cosmic Creeps he is cryptically credited as Donyo. I have a feeling this was an Alan Smithee situation, and he was trying to distance himself from the game. There's no way to know for sure, but after playing Cosmic Creeps I can see why it could be true. 

(Putting their name at the bottom of the screen is a good early example of "not the flex you think it is")

Cosmic Creeps is one of those boring Atari games that also doesn't make much sense. If you were to get this game in the wild and try to play it, you would probably die over and over again without accomplishing anything. Of course, you won't feel that accomplished after you have figured out how to play it either, but I'm not going to worry about that too much. I think the developers made it strange to hide the fact that it's very boring to actually play. I call this the Donyo Effect. The game consists of two screens. On the first you have to race from the bottom of the screen to the top while avoiding ambiguous space stuff. Third party games got really random with their graphics sometimes. This part can be tricky because you, the player, are in control. You control when the character pops onto the screen. Be careful because if you push up on the controller you will touch a red barrier and float away forever. It took me a while to figure out that the moving planet on the bottom of the screen determines where the character would pop up. It can still be tricky because sometimes there are tiny bits of red that are easy to miss, and there are also what appear to be comets flying by. However, complete your arduous trek to the spaceship at the top of the screen and you are rewarded with a very appropriate prize: nothing whatsoever. That's right, you earn no points for completing the first half of the game. That is pure laziness during an era where high scores were everything. Would it have been so hard to include a timed bonus or even a preset number of points? Even just an arbitrary 100 points would've been somewhat satisfying. This screen is confusing, overly difficult, and pointless both figuratively and literally. 

(Maybe it's called Cosmic Creeps because of the way the aliens slowly creep up the screen)

The second section of the game is where the action is because it actually lets you shoot at something and earn points. It now plays like a stripped-down Space Invaders with a couple of aliens chasing after a child moving up the screen. If the child makes it to the ship without being captured by the alien or taken out by friendly fire, then you get 1500 points. Don't worry though. If you accidentally shoot one of the space children, they are merely "bopped". I'm not sure what that means, but at least the people who wrote the manual cared enough to make sure their video game didn't have you unintentionally murdering children. This part could be fun if there was a bit more to it. The aliens don't do anything except move up the screen, and they are large targets. I had to make myself not shoot at them to see what would happen if they made it to the top. My game was over, but it never happened organically. I just stayed in one spot and shot aliens until time ran out. I must've done something wrong though because the manual says the game continues if you get 5000 points before the sun sets, but I achieved that almost every time I played, and it was still game over. I tried to find a YouTube playthrough but of course they all last about three minutes and don't help much. I know it must be true because the Twin Galaxies high score is over 180,000 points. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, but I could never get a game to last longer than that single round. I didn't really mind my game ending though, because I couldn't really see it getting much more fun. The manual states that there are never more enemies on the screen, so all they could do is get faster. That's not much of an extra challenge.

So Cosmic Creeps is a dud. The premise isn't terrible, but they took the easiest path in both sections. The first section is completely pointless, and the second is boring. It quickly becomes a game of staying in one spot and shooting a lifeless alien. Space Invaders was already five years old by the time Cosmic Creeps came out, and even the Atari version had a whole screen full of ships that actually shot at the player. Instead of adding to the Space Invaders formula, Cosmic Creeps subtracts almost everything. It's a dull game. In fact, it is so dull that it is going to make apologists happy. It's going into the subset of Atari games that are worse than E.T. It's the third one so far, but it is the first I have ranked that was widely released in the United States. Inca Gold and Birthday Mania are much worse, but I highly doubt anyone in the U.S. had played them in the pre-emulation days. So, fear not E.T. fans. You can at least tell younger generations that Cosmic Creeps was a real game that was worse. For those keeping score at home, it is 152/171 on the overall list and 20/22 on the Atari 2600 specific list. Maybe Telesys should just stick with arcade clones and space shooters. Those are usually successful. 

Atari 2600 quality percentage: 9/22 or 40.9%

Atari 2600 #21: Fast Food

Developer: Telesys

Publisher: Telesys

Release Date: October 1982

Fast Food is certainly a good example of what the company was trying to be. It's another funny game with an even more ridiculous cover than CocoNuts. There's just something undeniably fun looking about it. Look at all that food flying around! Look at those disembodied lips which remind me of old Twizzlers ads! Look at that decidedly car-less drive-in! If I had seen this one at a store in 1982, I might've bought it just because it looked like so much fun. I mean, I did see it on a store shelf at some point and buy it, but I would buy any Atari game as long as it's not too expensive. I have no idea who did the cover art for Telesys, but I hope they survived the game crash and had a long career. For all I know they really did make those Twizzlers ads. It's a shame we never really know these things. Telesys was founded by a man named Richard Taylor, and that's such a common name that MobyGames has over 700 of them in their database. That's not very helpful from a research perspective. I did find a picture of him in a vintage magazine article that also referred to Telesys games as "funny." I guess they don't really look that much different in 2024 than they did in 1982. 

(The legend himself!)

I would say that Fast Food is about as simple as it gets, but I've played CocoNuts. Fast Food is at least more complicated than that. It's a very simple premise that you might be able to glean from the cover art. You are a disembodied mouth trying to eat all of the flying food you possibly can. Fast Food ups the ante by allowing you to move vertically as well as horizontally. It's hard to get away with horizontal-only motion unless you are Space Invaders or Galaga, so it's nice that they only tried that experiment once. The only thing you are not supposed to eat are the purple pickles. Eat too many of them and its game over. Hey, you don't have to tell me twice. I can't say I've ever seen anything tubular and purple and wanted to eat it. The different types of food only move in straight lines, but they are worth different amounts of points and travel at different speeds. I appreciate the attempt at variety, but I don't see anyone strategizing in this game. They are just going to catch whatever they can. It gets frantic fast. Every so often the screen says, "You are getting fatter" and then everything speeds up. It's a shame they couldn't animate the fattening, but the fine folks at Telesys weren't exactly miracle workers. 

(I hope you weren't expecting anything else. This is just a one screenshot kind of game)

I'm going to sound like a broken record here, but the problem with Fast Food is the same one that plagued Atari 2600 games in general. It's just too simple for extended play. My games always last around the same amount of time, and I almost always get close to 1000 points. Those purple pickles start coming on fast, so even when I start out well everything goes downhill quickly. It's just hard to avoid the inevitable when everything starts moving so fast. I'm not going to be leaving behind a worse food item for a better one because there just isn't time for it. I don't know what anything is worth, and I don't really care. I'm just trying to avoid purple pickles.  

And this is going to sound like a weird complaint, but I can't get over how weird the smacking mouth in this game looks. I get that they wanted to animate something because that was always impressive in the early 80s, but that thing doesn't look anything like a real mouth. You would expect some teeth or a tongue, but those red fleshy masses barely even look like lips. They look more like two tongues covered in bubble gum flapping against each other. Or perhaps a toothless mouth covered in denture cream trying to open and close. It's shown from an odd side view which doesn't work at all. They should've done a front view and had the teeth opening or closing. Honestly a non-moving mouth would've been preferable. It's better than having what looks like two uncooked burger patties kissing. 

While definitely an improvement over CocoNuts, Fast Food is still a middle of the road Atari 2600 game. I have a little fun with it from time to time, but only being a little fun does not make a game actually good. Atari games can be thrilling and addictive, but Fast Food gets a little old after a few minutes. I can see why companies like Telesys failed so quickly. Video games were much more expensive at the time adjusted for inflation. Getting a new Atari game could run you something in the equivalent range of 80 or 90 dollars. That's a big investment for something you're going to get bored with in five minutes. I doubt any of the fringe 3rd party companies had any major hits because it was just too expensive. Luckily, this is 2024 where you can get Fast Food for only ten dollars. That's a fair price for a game based on poorly animated mouths and flying pickles. Fast food ranks at #107 overall which puts it right in the middle of the Atari section. Most Atari games in the purple section are worth playing for enthusiasts, so I'd call that a victory for now. It seems like there are a couple of Telesys games I like, so hopefully there are some hidden treasures to uncover moving forward. 

Atari quality percentage 9/19 or 47.36%

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1G01RKJ7-caaal5lgFfGgPfZRGcqWlv4E3E2E615UYKg/edit?usp=sharing

Playstation #3: Punky Skunk

Developer: Ukiyotei 

Publisher: Jaleco

Release Date: February 14, 1998

I will always be fascinated by the early days of PlayStation. It came into a world still dominated by Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis trying to succeed where every other disc-based system had failed. Sony had a great strategy of just releasing every kind of game. It was an unprecedented quality and quantity approach that had never really been seen before. No matter what kind of gamer you were there would be something for you on PlayStation. This means that in addition to games like Twisted Metal and Battle Arena Toshinden we also got 16-bit holdovers like Cool Spot and more than one Tiny Toon Adventures game. That's where a game like Punky Skunk fits in. It was the mid 90s so people were still playing character-based side scrollers. Punky Skunk feels like it should've been on an earlier console, but that was nothing unusual for a game released so early during PlayStation's run. It was so early that it was release #409. Wait, that's not an early game at all. That's right in the middle. It came out a couple weeks after Final Fantasy Tactics and just before SaGa Frontier. What's a game like Punky Skunk doing coming out even after Sonic the Hedgehog had started to fade? I need to look this up. 

Okay so Punky Skunk was originally meant to be a Super Nintendo game, but the developers started a bit too late and had to move it over to PlayStation. It was released in 1996 in Japan but not until early 1998 in North America. I have no idea why it took so long, but that definitely wasn't in Punky Skunk's favor. Maybe the publisher Jaleco saw the success of Crash Bandicoot and thought that there was still some life in mascot games and so they decided to take a chance on an already made side-scroller. Whatever the reason, Punky Skunk is definitely an oddity in a year that saw PlayStation release some of the greatest games of all time. 1998 was the year of Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid. Going forward Sony would certainly encourage more games like those instead of talking skunk games. I suppose it's good to have kid friendly games that aren't based on existing properties, so that's a point in Punky Skunk's favor. But is it actually a quality kids' game?

Well, that's hard to say. Punky Skunk is a game of modest pleasures that is mostly fun if you like throwbacks. Of course this is a skunk with an attitude. Of course he attacks by shooting stinky clouds at the enemies. The graphics do not look very good for 1998, but oddly enough they would fit in perfectly in 2024. They just have a wonderful 16-bit look to them. It feels like I'm playing a long-lost PC Engine game. It even has a world map which you know I love. The major gimmick is that Punky can find powerups that give him different abilities. There is a pogo stick that allows him to jump high and a parachute that allows him to glide for example. He can only have one ability at a time, but he can switch between normal attack mode and special item mode. This is important since many of the transformations don't come with an attack. The levels are largely centered around the abilities, but it can still be annoying switching back and forth to avoid damage. 

There are a few other annoyances that keep Punky Skunk from being a true winner. The biggest problem is the somewhat bland level design. There aren't that many levels that stick out in my mind after playing them. They mostly boil down to finding the special item and using it to find the end. Many of the early levels are very short. And it's not the type of game that encourages exploration. Most of the items are just for gaining extra lives. It's not the type that encourages going for 100%. There are some mini games that can eventually lead to more hit points, but the game is easy enough that they are purely optional. I wouldn't say it's too easy though. I got some game overs as I played and had to grind for lives a few times. I just with the levels had been designed with a bit more care. 

This is one of those situations where the more I thought about the game I was reviewing the more I liked it. I hadn't initially expected to give Punky Skunk a very good review, but its modest charms have won me over somewhat. I think it's been helped by the passage of time. It didn't fit in during PlayStation's heyday, but 25 years later and the charms stand out more than the drawbacks. I can't deny that I had some fun while I was playing it even if I did tend to play it in chunks. I played about a third of it at a time over the course of a few months. That's not the most responsible way to review a game, but it does show that I couldn't quite take myself away from it. I would move on to bigger and better things, but Punky Skunk would always find its way back into my brain.  

I am a bit of a failure as a list maintainer. I switched laptops recently, and for whatever reason my list didn't want to come along. If there's anyone out there who knows a good way for me to present it on my blog, please let me know. I haven't made a spreadsheet since my college technology class 20+ years ago, so I don't know what I'm doing. The list does still exist though, and Punky Skunk made it into the green section at #69. I have rated 169 games so far which means there are at least 100 games worse than Punky Skunk. Not bad for a skunk with attitude.  

PlayStation Quality Percentage 2/3

Atari 2600 #20: CocoNuts

Developer: Telesys

Publisher: Telesys

Release Date: October 1982

Telesys was one of the many publishers that showed up during Atari's boom years and then completely disappeared. The Atari 2600 existed for almost 15 years and had a very large library of games, but the majority of them came out between 1981 and 1983. In these years third party publishers were sprouting up everywhere and trying to find a gimmick. Telesys decided they were going to make funny games, and you can tell the games were going to be funny just by the names. See, it looks like the game is called coconuts like the tropical fruit, but there's an extra capital letter so it's actually called CocoNuts. Well, that implies this game is actually about mentally unstable people and not tropical fruit. Now that's funny! And just as a bonus it is also about coconuts. Coconuts are by far the funniest drupes. How could a game with such a wacky name not be a total romp? 

Well, the reason for that is because CocoNuts is an Atari 2600 game, and there's just not the processing power for games to be that funny. Oh, people tried, but about the best anyone could do was to make a typical generic blob actually look like something. When Megamania came out it won an award for being the funniest game of the year simply by having the player shoot at telephones and burgers instead of ships. That's about as funny as Atari games could get. Megamania is still a good game though because the developers remembered the gameplay. Fast Eddie was also fun even though its attempts at humor fell a bit flat. Telesys didn't have the talent of Activision or Sirius though, and so CocoNuts ends up being memorable but not particularly playable.

I will admit that it does look funny at firsts. You play as a man wearing both a pith helmet and an umbrella, and the trees look quite nice. The whole object of the game is to avoid coconuts being dropped by a monkey in the trees. If you get hit once you lose your umbrella, if you get hit twice you lose your helmet, and if you get hit a third time it's all over. Atari 2600 has several "avoid the falling objects" games with Kaboom! being most famous. Most of them were twitchy, high-speed paddle games. CocoNuts uses the regular controller and moves much slower. It doesn't even use the button for anything, so the whole game is just moving back and forth. It's easy to tell where the coconuts are going to fall from because they will drop below the monkey, but I still found it challenging. 

The very obvious problem with CocoNuts is that it is extremely repetitive, even by Atari standards. The coconuts get faster, and earning points will eventually earn extra lives, but there's never anything else on the screen. For CocoNuts to work it needed to be exciting to make up for the simplicity. In this regard it fails. Dodging coconuts gets old pretty quick. It might look fun and silly when you first turn it on, but it never changes. Even just having the monkey drop bonus points or objects with different speeds would've been a big improvement. 

Still, I will admit that I had fun with CocoNuts for a few minutes, so it wasn't a complete loss. I've been reviewing some bad games lately, so it's refreshing having one that goes into the purple okay section. It feels like that hasn't happened in a while. I've ranked some odd Atari games, so it's not even that low on the Atari specific list. Right now, it falls in at #116 on the overall list and 13 out of 20 on the Atari list. If you're a classic game collector you'll probably buy this one for a few dollars because it looks silly, play it for a few minutes, and then put it on the shelf forever. That's the fate that befalls so many Atari games, but there are worse fates for 40-year-old video games. At least it looks good on the shelf.

Atari Quality Percentage 9/20 or 45%