Colecovision #2: Pepper II

Developer: Exidy

Publisher: Exidy

Release Date: 1982

 I love the story behind this game’s strange name. It was originally supposed to be called Zipper. This name makes sense as the game is full of zippers. However, they discovered the name was already taken so they had to hastily change it. They changed it to Pepper and for unknown reasons added a II at the end despite it not being a sequel to anything. I guess they were worried that Pepper was too generic and that the Roman numerals would help it stand out. I suppose it worked because for years before I played it I knew there was a game out there called Pepper II and always wanted to check it out. I don’t know if I would’ve felt the same way if it was just called Pepper or even Zipper. I’m glad I finally played it too because it is yet another lost Colecovision classic.

 

Pepper II is maybe the best game on Colecovision that was never on another console. It’s a fast-paced and clever game that even works great with the Colecovision controller. It is a bit derivative though. It’s a maze game so of course there are touches of Pac-Man in it. It’s also a game about filling in squares so it’s a bit like Amidar. Unlike Amidar, however, Pepper II is fast and not nearly as geometric. The object of the game, just like its original name, is to zip up open zippers in a maze by moving over them. If you move backwards on one, it will unzip so you have to be careful. It was never much of an issue for me, but I was playing it on easy mode. You complete a section by filling up all four sides which makes the empty sections fill in. You are pursued by disembodied eyes and can defeat them by closing a section around a pitchfork. Hey what do you expect from a game called Pepper II? With a name that strange anything goes.

 

My favorite part of the game is that every level is split up into four maps. Getting tired of filling in the same old map? Just follow the path off the screen and you’ll find a different one. It sure blows Pac-Man out of the water with it’s one map ever. Maybe there is some sort of psychological element to it, but it really does make the game feel bigger and faster. I can’t believe how fast I can go while still being able to turn when I want to. Unlike Pac-Man I didn’t often get trapped in a corner. There always seems to be a way out of trouble, and there are plenty of pitchforks. It’s the perfect speedy maze game.

 

I always have a blast playing Pepper II, and it really is a great showcase for the Colecovision’s arcade capabilities. I really do get that exhilarating feeling that I get at a great arcade cabinet, and sure the visuals are simple, but they still look nice for what they are. It’s also managed to stay relatively cheap so if you have a Colecovision getting this game is a no-brainer. Pepper II finds itself all the way up at #20 on the list. It’s not quite as unique as Clu Clu Land, so it sneaks in just under that one. It’s been nice playing so many good games lately. I can only assume that every Colecovision game is good. I mean, I’ve like both of the ones I have played. I guess it’s time to go prove myself wrong.

 

Colecovision Quality Percentage: 2/2

 

1. Pepper II

2. Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park

(Images are from mobygames.ccom)

Colecovision #1: Cabbage Patch Kids: Adventures in the Park

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

Release Date: 1984

Sadly, it was also the last Cabbage Patch Kids Adventure game. Also, it's one of the first games with a female protagonist if dolls count.

 It feels like an act of desperation for Coleco to release a game based on their most popular property in 1984. In the darkest year for gaming in the US they tried to lob a Hail Mary and save the industry with a game based on the latest craze. Sadly, it didn’t do much for Coleco’s fortunes, and their console didn’t have much time left. This could be the story of a quick cash-in similar to E.T. for Atari. However, Adventures in the Park is a much better game than it has any right to be. I’m sure it helps that it was made by Konami who at the time was one of the best arcade developers around with classics like Frogger and Pooyan to their name. Stumbling onto a lost classic is always exciting, so when I played this game, I couldn’t wait to write about it.

I love those backgrounds

 I first played this game on my MSX emulator, but I think I might like the even smoother Colecovision version better. Adventures in the Park plays like a more complex Pitfall, and not only because you swing on vines. It’s an early side-scrolling platformer with a massive 100 different numbered screens. Some of them repeat, and a few early ones are just walking from one side to another, but it’s still an impressive amount of game for 1984. It uses just about every gaming mechanic available at the time outside of shooting aliens. You jump over obstacles, hop from platform to platform, ride on lily pads, and avoid giant bees among other things. It’s impressive how much skill it takes to master what should be a simple Cabbage Patch Kids game.

 

It's why they're called platform games

I also love that each screen is individually numbered. The counter and game start over after number 99 so it doesn’t truly have an ending, but the numbering gives each screen a unique feel. Sometimes I would get stuck on a particular screen, like that tricky jumping ball obstacle on screen 24, so the numbering gives a real feel of accomplishment. It’s a game based much more on progression than score which anticipates what games would become in the mid-80s. Of course, it’s also fun trying to get a high score as well. You get a massive bonus for completing each 10-level stage, so speed it key. I played this game over and over again just to try to raise my score by a couple hundred points, and every time I played I seemed to get a little better. It’s a game with a very high ceiling.

How could I ever forget scene 12?

 I know I sound like I’m gushing about, but I live for pleasant gaming surprises like this one. I don’t have much experience with Colecovision outside of the Flashback plug-and-play, but this is easily one of my favorite games on the console. It’s a shame that licensing issues keep this one off of compilations. Hopefully the console is full of pleasant surprises like this one. It’s a game that looks and plays great and makes me a little sad that the Colecovision had such a short life. Can you believe I am putting a Cabbage Patch Kids game in the top 25? Because that’s totally what I am doing. It’s my new #23 right below Alex Kid in Shinobi World. Not bad for a cash-in game designed for kids. If only every licensed game was made with this much care.

 

Colecovision Quality Percentage: 1/1

images are from mobygames.com

Vectrex #2: Spike

Developer: GCE

Publisher: GCE

Release Date: 10-1983

No add-on needed!

 

Spike has such a good presentation that I really wanted to like it. I played it once and was ready to put it in the green column. It has a big cartoon mascot, synthesized voice, and neat pseudo-3d visuals. Unfortunately, first impressions are sometimes incorrect, and this game illustrates why I really need to play the games for a while before I can judge them.

 

Spike is a very early platform game that is pretty much nothing but platforms. You play as the titular Spike trying to save his girlfriend Molly from a bad guy named Spud. Yep, this is a Donkey Kong clone. The gameplay is much simpler than Donkey Kong though. The main objective is to move across scrolling platforms while collecting Molly’s bows and then exiting the door at the top. At least they’re bows according to Wikipedia. I could’ve sworn they were keys. It’s a bit hard to tell what is what in this game, which is a flaw I will admit. Eventually monsters show up and the platforms start to move faster, but the basic gameplay never changes.

 

Since this is Vectrex with its four action buttons the controls are a little overly complicated. One button jumps, one button moves the ladder, one button kicks to the left, and one button kicks to the right. This is much more complicated than it needs to be, and I think it works against the overall game. It would’ve been better if the ladders were in fixed locations. It takes out much of the strategy and tension when the ladders can just be moved anywhere. Also, the kicks don’t seem to do anything. Either that or they have to be so precise that I could never get one to land. It’s one of those cases where they had four buttons and were going to use them no matter what.

 

As an early attempt to copy Nintendo this game is interesting. GCE did something that every company would be doing in a few years. It’s an oddly innovative game in that respect. However, the gameplay is just too shallow to put it very high on the list. It stays out of the red because I would definitely play it again, but I don’t like it as much as Spin Ball. As much as I hate putting two games from the same console next to each other that’s just where Spike belongs. It is going right below Spin Ball at #77. That’s not bad for a weird old platform game, but I’m sure hoping that that Vectrex has some hidden gems. I only have twenty left to review so it better hurry up and impress me.

 

Vectrex Quality Percentage: 0/2

 Rankings:

 1. Spin Ball

2. Spike

(images are from mobygames.com)

Game Boy #3: Great Greed

Developer: Namco

Publisher: Namco

Release Date: 4-1-93

Now I know what the best non-Pokémon or Final Fantasy RPG on Game Boy is. Great Greed is an excellent game that pushes the limits of the console. Of course, it’s also one of those games that was $20 five years ago and now goes for about $150. I really hate the state of retro gaming these days. Luckily this is 2022, so it’s not hard to find a cheaper way to play. It’s certainly worth checking out though. It just shows what can be accomplished when a high-quality developer puts their heart and soul into a game.

 

Great Greed is a classic turn-based RPG, which of course is my favorite kind of game. Most RPGs on Game Boy are slow, but this one moves surprisingly fast even when level grinding. There is quite a bit of level grinding involved so be warned if you don’t like that sort of thing. They are able to speed things up by getting rid of the menu screens during battles. All the actions are mapped to specific buttons with the control pad used for spells which you have to equip. It works very well even if it means the options in battle are somewhat limited. The spells are mostly typical in this game, and I didn’t use offensive ones very often. I mostly used healing and status spells.

 Great Greed is one of those games that starts out silly but gets more serious and difficult as it goes on. The first person you meet is named Microwave, so you know it’s going to be a weird game. Most of the characters and places have food related names. It has both a fantasy and technological setting. In one area you have to save a pop singer from a record store which includes giant spinning records on the floor. However, Bio-Haz, the villain in the game, is menacing enough to never let things get too silly. It is well-balanced in its presentation. It also has a large amount of narrative for a Game Boy game. It’s very impressive in that way.

 

Be careful though, the last third of the game gets very difficult. Once you’ve passed through an area you can never go back. That means that when you get to the last town you are stuck there. Of course, it’s just about the only town in the game with no inn, so I struggled for a bit, especially since the final dungeon was full of difficult monsters. There is a person that sells healing items, but he’s not in a regular shop so I didn’t find him for a long time. Luckily leveling up fully recovers the hero, so I figured out how to time my level ups so that I could recover at just the right time. I thought this was going to be yet another RPG that played through the first two-thirds of only to get stalled and never finish. Luckily I was able to persevere. Hopefully I can do the same with The Sword of Hope II. I don’t have that many more Game Boy RPGs to finish after that one.

 There is one moment that is a little creepy though. At the end of the game the king lets you get engaged to one of his daughters. After the credits are over you can read biographies of all the sisters. It turns out that only one of them was over 18, and the youngest was only 11. Imagine accidentally getting married to an 11 year old. At least no marriage takes place, and is implied that the hero and his betrothed weren’t going to be married for a while. Still, it’s one of those semi-gross moments that comes up in JRPGs from time to time. It doesn’t ruin the game, but it was a weird thing to discover at the absolute last second.

 So this one is going high up on the list. It’s at a very respectable 22^nd right behind Tails’ Adventures. It’s one of the better 8-bit RPGs that I have played, and it’s a shame that it has gotten so expensive. It’s the kind of game that only the most dedicated RPG players have probably ever heard of, and the high price tag certainly doesn’t change that. I don’t think it was ever on the 3DS store either like so many other old handheld RPGs. It’s definitely a game that deserves some more attention. I feel like I’ve gone a little easy on Game Boy so far. All three games I have played have been high quality ones. I need to play some licensed crap just to even things out. Perhaps I will do that in the near future. Stay tuned!

 

Game Boy Quality Percentage: 3/3 or 100%

images are from mobygames.com

Game Boy Rankings

1. Great Greed

2. Knight Quest

3. Super Mario Land

Playstation 4 #3: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture

Developer: Chinese Room Ltd.

Publisher: Sony

Release Date:  8-11-2015

The name and title screen really don't have any relation to the game itself

 Never have I played a game more cowardly than Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. It tries to be a profound look at human nature, but the developers were too afraid to commit to anything real that would give the game true meaning. The game starts after the story’s end, takes all the people out of the picture, and gets rid of practically all gameplay elements. What this creates is a game almost impossible to connect to. There’s just so much nothing in this game. The fact that this game garnered so many positive reviews really show how desperate people in the gamer community are to elevate their hobby into the realm of art. People are so desperate for this type of validation that they will latch on to anything that even has a hint of deeper meaning. However, just because something is sad and ambiguous doesn’t make in meaningful. Sometimes a sad, boring game is just a sad, boring game. If the developers had any courage, they could’ve used similar themes and put them into an engaging game. Instead, they take the most basic themes of alienation and loss and decide to do nothing with them. Or rather, they make the player do nothing with them.

Hey, look it's some paint cans

 So the game goes like this. The world has ended and everybody is seemingly dead. It’s your job playing as a being of pure plot device to find out what happened. Spoiler alert: they did not go to the rapture. You do this by walking very slowly through the most boring-looking small town in all of England. It’s the kind of town where everybody has the same tv, microwave, radio, and garage full of paint cans. I know this because I looked in all those houses. It’s important to the game to walk through as many houses as possible. And yet, they are all basically the same. It’s another case of the developers being to afraid to actually give their game personality. Why should they make anything unique or interesting? I’ve seen plenty of garages in my life, and none of them looked much the same. Yet in this fictional setting where your only task is to slowly wander through houses everything is completely devoid of personality. If you want us to connect with the people in your story you have to make them seem like actual people. The graphics are used to make everything looks as real as possible, but it felt more artificial than even the most cartoony game. They work so hard to make it all look real and then spoil the illusion by replicating the same objects over and over again. Now I know practically every game reuses sprites and images more than once. The big different here is that there’s nothing but empty fields and bland houses to look at. It’s not just background sprites. It’s the whole game.

 

My least favorite part, though, is just how impersonal this game is. You collect clues by following a swoosh of light all over the map. You could really do nothing else in the game except follow the swoosh but exploring everywhere will give you even more details. When you get to certain spots you will hear the characters talking without ever being able to see them. Not only is this a lazy way to get out of having to animate any actual people but it makes connecting with the characters difficult. They never seem like more than flashes of light in an empty universe.

 

 

I felt pretty empty at the end of this one. It’s a game where you do nothing, connect to nobody, and come out of the experience with no further insights. All you do is follow the bouncing spirit and look at paint cans. My favorite part of the whole game was finally stumbling across the paint store. That’s not a good look. So once again we have a game that’s going to go below Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. At least that game was only thirty minutes and had a little action. I hope I stop getting games worse than Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots because I am sure getting tired of typing out that name. So Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture just barely makes it into my top 100, and I am very excited that I now have a top 100. It’s been a lot of purple and red lately on the ol’ list so hopefully I will play a good game again soon. I just never know how things are going to turn out when I follow my whims. Perhaps I just don’t have very good whims these days. Oh well.

Playstation 4 Quality Percentage: 0/3

(images are from mobygames.com)

Vectrex #1: Spin Ball

Developer: GCE

Publisher: GCE

Release Date: July 1983

Have you ever seen a Vectrex box before? I think they look nice.

 It seems like there’s always something stopping me from reviewing an entire library of games. There are a couple of problems reviewing Vectrex games. The first problem is that six of the games require peripherals that I don’t have access to. Alright, so I’ll review the other 22 games. That’s a very small amount. Well, it turns out that a Vectrex costs about 400 dollars on the low end these days so it’s time to emulate. I will admit that I am never going to get the true experience of a Vectrex by playing it on a modern tv with a modern controller. This was the console that came with its own tv and had a controller with a gaudy four action buttons in 1982. Still, I can judge if the games are good or not. So, what’s the problem now? The first game I picked out to play is the one that doesn’t emulate well. I was going to call Spin Ball an absolute mess. The ball traveled through walls, and it was all very flickery. Thankfully it’s not the game’s fault and without the emulation errors it turns out to be a playable pinball simulator.

Yep, this is about it

 Of course, this is a pinball game from 1982 so it’s not going to blow anybody away, but it does some things that I like. First, it’s one of the first pinball games to have a skill shot. If you hit the ball just right with the plunger you can have it knock over most of the drop targets. The drop targets lead to the game’s best feature. Knock them all over to reveal a special symbol in the lower part of the table. If you hit this symbol, you will trigger multiball. I could be wrong, but I think this is the first pinball video game with a multiball. As you would imagine it’s fast and frantic and it usually doesn’t last very long. It sure was a pleasant surprise though.

 

Unfortunately, after ten minutes or so of playing I had already experienced everything in the game. It’s about as shallow as you would expect for a 1982 pinball game. I will probably play it again because I love pinball, but it’s certainly not the Vectrex game to track down first. It doesn’t really show off the unique properties of the console either. The best Vectrex games had a very futuristic, pseudo-3D look to them, but Spin Ball looks flat and boring. So, despite its innovations Spin Ball is going fairly low on the list. It’s all the way down at #75 which is lower than I expected actually. That’s even lower than Pocketbike Racer. It’s not a good sign when your game is shallower than one sold alongside combo meals. So, I have 21 more Vectrex games to review, and this is probably the least interesting of the bunch. Get ready for some angular fun in the near future. 

Vectrex quality percentage: 0/1

(images are from mobygames.com)

Sorry no list today. The computer is acting funny and won't save the screenshot. Just trust me, it's #75 and it's right in the purple "okay" section.