Buy Random
Episode II
Episode I of this little journey chronicled newer titles, mostly on the Xbox 360 and Wii. We’ll do a little bit of time traveling for this one. I’m going to do my best to avoid games that I bought as part of a giant collection of titles, and stick with individual purchases. As these hail from the era of my youth, it is dominated by Nintendo fare, but there’ll be another with fewer titles from Nintendo consoles. In fact, I think after this, I’ll try to mix it up a bit, based on consoles and eras.
Now, you’ll notice a trend here (or maybe you won’t, I don’t know how observant you are), I did not necessarily “blind buy” most of the games on these lists, nor did I buy them completely withoutany reason. Usually, the reasoning is extremely simple: Perhaps the game was super cheap when I found it. Sometimes I looked at the back, noticed who the developer was, and that was all I needed to be interested. So it’s not quite as random as when I was a kid and opened that pack of Bowman baseball cards and one had Mike Piazza’s rookie in there and lo and behold, it was the most valuable card in the set. But the randomness comes from very little—if any—research. Very little—if any—foreknowledge of the game’s existence. And very little—if any—information on its status among reviewers or sales. And believe it or not, I bought this stuff randomly:
Kissy time.
1.
Battle Blaze (SNES)
So, in about 2008, my game collecting changed up a pace when I bought my first older console “just to have it.” It was a Genesis, which I loved as kid, but never owned. By 2010, this addiction had ramped up considerably to the point that I was skimming eBay just for “cheap old games.” That’s where I found Battle Blaze. It was a nickel. Plus shipping. I paid about $2.50 for this game in that regard.
Battle Blaze is the most inept, limited, and dismal fighting game ever made. Yep, even worse than Street Fighter X Tekken. It has only about 6 characters, and it still manages to include a doppelganger (multiple characters with identical looks/moves). But that’s not the worst of the game. The worst part of this fighting game is that it includes exactly one (1) attack button. The other used face button, is for jumping. Everybody has precisely one (1) special move, and guess what? They’re pretty much performed the same. Because of this lack of move or attack options, characters totally lack balance. The “story mode” is a joke that can be finished in about 12 minutes, and after that, you have pretty much exhausted all that this game offers. At least I got it cheap.
Admit it, you have no idea what's going on.
2.
Bubble Bobble (NES)
I don’t know how this one came into my life. All I remember is that it was picked up used at some point—twice somehow, so Bubble Bobble marks the first time I ever purchased a game twice. Both times used, at that. It also marks the first time that a controller was actually worn out from essentially standard use. But it wasn’t exactly standard.
As kids, my brother and I pounded dozens of hours into Bubble Bobble, and almost all of it with the Game Genie attached. And we did this for three reasons, because we were generally unskilled at this game, because we wanted nearly unlimited lives, and because Bubble Bobble is *** hard. It’s also a pure blast to play with someone else. Even without the Game Genie, the game is frantic, hectic, and insane. Levels can be cleared in mere seconds, but there are well over a hundred. The point is to, essentially, spit on enemies trapping them in bubbles so they can be killed. Also, you can bounce and ride on bubbles to reach new areas. Elements like wind, gravity wells (of a sort) and teamwork make the entire experience wholly deeper and more complex. Just be warned, the game never appeared to have an ending, and culminated in something like a dozen boss battles in a row with the same boss. Whether or not this was a side effect of the Game Genie or part of the design, I have no clue!
I think that guy died.
3. Dual Blades (Game Boy Advance)
An interest sparked in me around the time I picked up Battle Blaze where I stumbled upon the idea of looking for little-known, overwhelmingly violent games through gaming’s past. Dual Blades showed up in that regard, and as it was almost totally unknown, and an exceptionally rare Mature-rated Game Boy Advance game. There were only about nine such titles on the system, which included Max Payne, Mortal Kombat, and Grand Theft Auto, believe it or not.
Dual Blades is the second fighting game on this segment, and features only 9 playable characters. The set-up is not entirely dissimilar from Samurai Shodown as it is very much a weapon-based fighter. This is also a vastly superior game compared to Battle Blaze. But wait, I bought it for violence! Well, there’s a lot of blood splatter, but it doesn’t stick around on the ground, and the bloody sprays are all the same animation, it’s also not particularly detailed, but hell, if you finish with special moves, you are generally likely to cut your opponent in half—at which point, their bottom half remains standing with a red smear in the middle, and the top half falls comfortably to the ground. So it looks kind of awkward. But hell, the game is actually fun, the fighting works really well, and smartly (this still wasn’t completely common at this time), all the moves appear on the pause menu—and in the manual. For some reason, they’re written differently, though, which is weird. One mentions the actual buttons—“A”, “B”, etc, the other lists the names of the moves. Go figure.
Splatter dragon.
4. Death Duel (Genesis)
Death Duel joined my little collection around the same time as Dual Blades and for the same reason—ye olde gory violence. As anyone who’s been around longer than the Playstation brand should be able to recall, Sega was Johnny-on-the-spot with rating their games fairly early on, and maybe a year or two ahead of the establishment of the ESRB. This way Sega could get away with more violent games early on, essentially. Well, this little gem even predates Sega’s own rating system and has a warning merely printed on the label stating that it was not for anyone under violence-friendly age of… thirteen.
Death Duel is a first-person style game, essentially. You are in a giant robot and you face off against a single alien monster in front of you as you move/turn left and right to shoot at the other creature. This involves blowing its limbs off, blowing heads off, and blowing up the creatures. The first one, a dragon for some reason, will see its legs blasted gorily off in the process. Unfortunately, the gameplay is utterly broken and unbalanced. You have options to earn money, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever earn enough to get quality weapons, and the best weapons are likely to easily miss their mark and be wasted. Eventually, the game is a constant battle where you essentially do a little worse with each new battle. To make matters worse, the matches are timed and the enemy creatures like to hide behind walls and often at the edge of the screen where your reticle cannot physically reach them! Suffice to say, it’s a curiosity to be sure, but the gameplay is utterly broken and unbalanced, rife with cheating, weapons are ridiculously expensive, and on top of that—damage you incur carries over from one battle to the next which also costs money if you want repaired! It’s a facepalm in cartridge form.
Yes, this is an insane rotating boss battle.
5. Gunstar Super Heroes (Game Boy Advance)
While meandering through a BX on a military base, during training no less, I happened upon a shelf with some discounted stuff. This game was sitting on there. It was four whole dollars brand new. I picked it up, curious as it were, and gazed at the back. Hmmm… There were several E3 awards printed on there. And then there was the kicker—that logo—Treasure. Treasure!? Why, that, those, er—THOSE ARE THE GUYS THAT MADE IKARUGA. I LOVE IKARUGA. So I bought Gunstar Super Heroes. Here’s a little history about Treasure, per my understanding. They were formed by a bunch of guys that had made Contra III on the SNES. They later made a run-n-gun title for the Genesis which was the predecessor to this—Gunstar Heroes. They are known for challenging run-n-gun platformers, action games, and shmups like Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun and Bangai-O.
This is largely a remake of its earlier Genesis incarnation, with new levels, a different weapon system, and vastly upgraded graphics as the GBA was a little 32-bit powerhouse compared to the 16-Bit, decade-old Genesis. The weapon system is complex and the levels are varied and insane. Treasure (who also developed insane shooter/shmup Sin & Punishment) is known for ridiculously Michael Bay-ish action sequences and blistering intensity—all of it wrapped into one of the most carefully balanced, surprisingly fair, but ultimately challenging gaming packages you’ll likely ever see. The game is not very long, but it was challenging and varied, and the complex weapon system allowed for a further variety in how players approached things. Difficult to describe—you just need to experience it.
There's adventure all over the place.
6. The Legend of Zelda (NES)
Back in the day, I was forced by my parents to suck it up and learn some responsibility, if I wanted a Nintendo so bad, I should just buy it myself. After two weeks in a hospital battling pneumonia—where an ever-present NES made this easier, I came home addicted, and scrimped and saved my allowance until I had the money to get it. Early on the next year (six months after my hospital visit, I had saved enough and bought it right after Christmas), we were looking to expand our library on this new device. At Target (I still have the receipt in the game’s box), the original gold cartridge version of The Legend of Zelda was cheaply priced at $20, which was reasonable to my Mom. So I bought this totally random game totally at random, that looked interesting, but was mostly purchased because it was affordable.
That’s right. One of the most important, revolutionary, and famous titles in the history of gaming was also one of my first games, entirely by chance. Because it was cheap. It came with the manual, of course, the cartridge was gold, it saved my games (cumbersomely), it came with a half-finished map (which I, ahem, finished), and it was a massive, expansive world that introduced the concept of exploration in gaming to me. I loved it from the start, and it was the first game I ever finished—that’s right, my NES came with Super Mario Bros, but I finished Zelda first. Running around overjoyed at my accomplishment, w00ts before there were w00ts, no less. That’s right GameInformer folks, the guy that berates you for poor grammar and asinine comments (some of you guys make really stupid comments, just “deal with it”) was once an innocent little kid who literally ran around proclaiming his accomplishment of shooting Ganon in the face with a Silver Arrow after trudging through a final labyrinth that he had mapped himself in his own home-made Zelda guide packet. These days, crusty old me is more inclined to be critical of the Zelda franchise for its latter-day lack of growth and evolution, but at one time, it was my whole world. And it was purchased randomly, entirely on a whim, because it was cheap at the time. Amazing how meaningful that one chance purchase was.