#retro roulette

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Retro Roulette #102: Crazy Taxi 2 (Dreamcast, 2001)

EDITOR’S NOTE - this review was originally published on January 16, 2020 at www.retro-roulette.net. Be sure to check that site for all the latest reviews There are ten more reviews there that haven’t made their way to Tumblr yet!

You know that Crazy Bread from Little Caesar’s? This is like that, but with taxis.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, Sega dared to picture a world dominated by The Offspring and Burger King, and where any taxi ride costs hundreds of dollars. Now that’s a utopia. The result was Crazy Taxi, a game about taxis that I guess is crazy.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, the main game is pretty straight forward. You drive around in a taxi, picking up people, and then taking them where they want to go. Crazy, right?!?! The difficulty comes from the game’s clock, which is pretty unforgiving. A standard game gives you 50 seconds to start, and gives you more whenever you pick up a new ride (and a bonus of a few seconds here and there for having a quick fare). In practice, it’s tough to not fall behind on time (it’s very much in the spirit of quarter-eating arcade games), but it’s still pretty frantic fun.

Crazy Taxi 2 adds a few new things to the mix, including some new drivers to play as:

In addition to the different drivers, there are also two different maps to play on, and a few different modes for each – the usual arcade mode, and some modes with set amounts of time instead of the constant “race-against-the-clock” scenario. I quite like these, as there’s a bit less pressure in finding fares and such. You can also pick up multiple fares at once, which offers another layer of strategy when figuring out who to pick up and when. It also leads to people entering your cab in weird ways:

Oh, and you can jump. I know you’re a car, but it’s still true. Maybe that’s the crazy part. My favorite aspect of Crazy Taxi 2, however, is the Crazy Pyramid, a mode that is truly, unabashedly crazy.

This tasks you with a bunch of mini-games – some are based on taking a fare in a world filled with weird jumps or ramps, while others are simply focused on going off a huge jump or, uh…playing golf:

Rather than explain this further, I’m just gonna include another screen shot.

Completing two of these challenges that are next to each other in the ‘pyramid’ will open up the challenge above both of them, moving upwards until you get to the final challenge. These can get VERY difficult, and they’re super fun to try and figure out and optimize.

There are a few rather abrasive things about Crazy Taxi 2, which I can easily chalk up to the time it was released (early 2001) – one is the profoundly annoying announcer, who sounds like if Tom Waits was a 22-year-old surfer dude who wanted you to suffer. It’s terrible. Some of the controls feel a bit archaic as well – if you need to drive in reverse (and you probably will), you need to come to a stop and manually change gears, as opposed to the standard “the brake is also the reverse” paradigm that’s common in a lot of games. I realize that this is literally how actual cars work and I probably shouldn’t complain about it, but dammit, I say it’s annoying. If you don’t like it, make your own blog. The game is still pretty fun in general, though.

One more original title was released in the Crazy Taxi series, the Xbox exclusive Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller, which had a Las Vegas-y vibe. Attempted ports/remakes for the GBA and PSP followed, but that was all she wrote for these crazy taxis. I’m kinda surprised no one has dug up the corpse of this franchise…it’s probably only a matter of time, though. I wouldn’t mind seeing a modern take on the concept.

Next week’s game is another super rad Dreamcast sequel, and one with a truly stellar (and well-deserved) reputation. I’m excited to take it for a whole bunch of spins. See you then!

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Retro Roulette #101: Alien 3 (NES, 1993)

It was only a matter of time before the horrible rainbow of LJN made its return.

I’ve talked before about my disdain for LJN, the company behind this week’s game – they specialized in two things: poorly made adaptations of popular IPs, and getting kids killed (for real – check out the details in that link). An adaptation of Alien 3 is exactly the sort of thing that LJN would do, and, well, here we are. I honestly know nothing about this one specifically.

The game works like this – in each level, there are some number of prisoners that you (Ripley) have to find and rescue, all while hopefully not getting killed by a xenomorph or whatever. Each level is fairly labyrinthine, and the prisoners can be fairly spread out. You’ve got a variety of different weapons at your disposal, and just need to platform your way through before the time runs out. Oh yeah – and there’s a timer.

I hope you think this image is really cool, because you’ll be seeing it a lot. For whatever reason, the timer in Alien 3 is incredibly unforgiving. Did you skip a prisoner on an otherwise optimal path, or go to a dead end mistakenly? There’s a decent chance you’re just screwed. If you’re on a level you’ve never played before, there’s a decent chance you just have no shot. Helpfully (and I use that word somewhat loosely), when you die to the timer the game pans around to show you the locations of the prisoners you missed…and then shows you their deaths.

Alien 3 isn’t all bad, to be fair – the environments are solid, the soundtrack is surprisingly good, and the character animations are impressively detailed. For example, Ripley has a tumbling animation that literally made me laugh out loud:

I found that once I had a really good feel for where all the prisoners were in a level, trying to safely and efficiently rescue them all wasn’t so bad of an experience. If the game offered up a more helpful map (there’s a radar thing, but it’s pretty useless), this would be a considerably better title. Of course, this is LJN, so naturally we can’t have too many nice things.

I feel like LJN had a remarkable ability to makes games that would seem good. Their graphics and sound were typically passable, the gameplay was often functional on the surface, and they made stuff based game based on [insert popular thing you like here]. I guess when you’re making a game based on a big franchise, seeming good is all you really have to do to make it sell. Well, that and crawling through vents like the cool hero you are:

It’s hard to recommend this to anyone but the most die-hard of Alien and/or Sigourney Weaver fans. The NES has a bunch of great action games with varying degrees of people rescuing and time restrictions, and this isn’t one of them. Code Name Viper, Contra, etc. Play those.

Next week’s game is a turn-of-the-century racing title that will certainly make me feel like a high schooler loser all over again. I can’t wait.

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Retro Roulette #91: Knight Rider (NES, 1989)

You might believe that shovelware based on licensed properties is a relatively new phenomenon. Of course, if you’ve read this blog before, you’d know that you would be wrong.

Knight Rider was first released in Japan in 1989. A lot of times that means it’s some original Japanese concept with a US property tagged on, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here - as far as I can tell, it was always just Knight Rider. It also has this cover art, in which David Hasselhoff is nowhere to be found:

I sure am pumped by the captivating tagline “You Drive the Car From the Hit TV Series.” In truth, driving that car about all the TV show and the game have in common - the TV show Knight Rider was very largely non-violent, where as this...

They kinda got the car right, at least. Much more akin to, say, RoadBlasters, Knight Rider is pretty much your standard late-80s "drive and shoot” fare. As you progress from city to city, you’ll be able to power up your car with more weapons and other power-ups.

I’ll admit that while it fails as a Knight Rider adaptation, this isn’t entirely awful as a racing game - it’s well-paced and looks decent. However, like a lot of games of this type, it is sadistically hard. You aren’t given a reasonable amount of any of the things you need to keep playing, including shields, gas, and available time, both of which deplete surprisingly rapidly. There are yellow cars that you can shoot to replenish these, but there aren’t a lot of them, and there’s a lot to avoid while trying to get to them.

Ugh. A lot of these old games were designed to just suck up quarters, which is understandable, but translating that concept to a home console just feels mean (I’ll also note that this was never an arcade game, despite really feeling like one). The game does mercifully have a password system, as well as a ‘Drive’ mode where there aren’t enemies to deal with and it’s more of a time trial sort of thing. Of course, then you don’t get to talk to Devon...

If you can put up with the difficulty, Knight Rider is a decent amount of fun and certainly not the worst racing game on the NES. A loose copy will run you less than $10. If you do check it out, I recommend doing so while listening to the song “Michael (Jump In)” by No More Kings, easily the best song I know about Knight Rider.

Next week’s game is a 16-bit classic, and one that also has a well-deserved reputation for being brutally difficult. I have fond memories of being awed by (and hating) this one as a child. I’ll see you then!

[retro-roulette]

Retro Roulette #86: Kid Chameleon (Genesis, 1992)

Folks, it just does not get more rad than this.

Kid Chameleon was developed and published by the good folks at Sega in May of 1992. This was a good time for Sega - at the time, Sonic the Hedgehog was still a smash hit and sales were booming - a Sonic boom, if you will. The game is regrettably unrelated is unrelated to the song “Chameleon,” which was sung by a kid at the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest.

I always enjoyed the backstory to this game - essentially, you’re a rad 90s kid who went to an arcade and got kidnapped by a cool new VR game. I figure we’re about six months away from that happening for real. The “chameleon” part comes from his ability to change forms through a series of helmets, which give him different cool abilities. You can be a tank, a samurai, a Jason Voorhees ripoff that throws axes, and a bunch more. It’s awesome.

Picking up a new helmet gives you full health (some give you a higher max health than others). If you have a helmet and run out of health, you change back to regular old, weakling Kid Chameleon, left to try and find a new one. You’re decently fast as your regular self, but your health is dangerously low and you have to be *super* careful.

While it’s a “run around and jump on bad guys” sort of game at its core, one of the most notable things about Kid Chameleon is that, especially compared to similar games of the time, it is absolutely massive. You’ll need to play through about 50 levels at a minimum, but there are branching paths and hidden things that brings the total level count to over 100. One hundred! That’s absurd for a game like this. There’s also no password or other sort of save option, so make sure you’re ready for the long haul.

Thankfully, if you can deal with that, it’s a really fun game! The different ‘suits’ all play really differently, and the levels are interesting and varied, with a bunch of cool, weird enemies in all of them. The music’s cool and 90s as heck - it’s a great retro experience. There are a decent number of extra life and continue pickups to help you get through it all as well, which is nice.

If you want to check this one out but don’t have a Genesis, there are a few different “Genesis Collection” compilations where it’s available. There’s also a *mobile* version available for free in the usual app stores. This version is similar to the original, only with more weird advertisements for how to invest like a woman:

I’m mildly surprised this never got a sequel (Kid Chameleon, not the Ellevest advertisement). He did show up in comic strip form in Sonic the Comic for a while (which is true of a lot of Sega characters of the time), but that’s really about it. Now that the 90s are cool again, I wonder if it’s only a matter of time.

Our improbable run of truly great games continues next week with one of the greatest portable games of all time, and one that’s a remarkably timely choice. See you then!

[retro-roulette]

Retro Roulette #74: Jet Grind Radio (Dreamcast, 2000)

Why aren’t more logos this pointy? Get it together, games industry.

Sega’s Jet Grind Radio was among the first big-name exclusives for the Dreamcast. In other markets it was called Jet Set Radio (the U.S. name was changed due to some trademark-related issues), though the game itself is otherwise the same. In short - if you’re into radical dudes and dudettes using the power of spray paint to save the world, this is the game for you.

The game starts out with a simple premise - the DJ of a pirate radio station broadcasts specifically to a handful of rival street gangs who enjoy rollerblading and graffiti and nothing else. Eventually they do battle with an evil CEO who has a vinyl record that summons demons. We’ve all been there. That DJ looks more or less exactly how you’d suspect:

In each level, you play as one of three skaters, who must spray tags onto a handful of pre-determined locations, while avoiding cops and being super rad and cool. Eventually, you’ll also be approached by various other skaters, who challenge you to replicate specific sequences of maneuvers; if you do these, they’ll join your crew. These are pretty fun, and occasionally quite challenging.

Each level is decently big and requires some amount of exploration to figure out where all the tag spots are. Thankfully, each one gives you a generous amount of time to do so - in some cases, you’ll definitely need it. As you tag more spots, the powers that be get angrier and angrier with you, and send increasingly ridiculous things to try and stop you - SWAT teams, police dogs, paratroopers, and even helicopters.

You’ll also occasionally run into this guy, who’ll just walk up and shoot you. There’s even a helpful green arrow to indicate “look here - this is the guy that is shooting you.”

The variety of challenges, solid level design, and gorgeous, cell-shaded aesthetics make Jet Grind Radio an absolute must-have. It’s not perfect - I wish movement was a bit less wonky, and the camera is occasionally unhelpful - but this is one of the few Retro Roulette games that I genuinely struggled to put down. It’s just so fun. Even replaying the same levels again, to get a faster finish time and a higher score, is super enjoyable.

With that in mind, I kinda can’t believe that, in an industry where anything popular gets a bunch of sequels, this series only got two releases (this one, and the Xbox game Jet Set Radio Future). It dared to be different, had an awesomely unique aesthetic and attitude, developed a solid fan base, and just...died. Sega still has the rights to the series, but just doesn’t seem interested in revisiting it. That’s kinda on-brand for them in terms of decision making, really. The Xbox One exclusive Sunset Override certainly takes inspiration from it, so maybe that’s something?

As a related aside, I also wonder sometimes about the future of Dreamcast gaming in general. It’s already relatively hard to find games for it, and the essential ones have been creeping up in price pretty steadily. The consoles themselves are also notoriously finicky, and it’s only going to get harder to find one in good, working order. At some point, there won’t be many working ones at all. That’s really weird to think about. I hope I’m wrong, or that a good solution presents itself in the coming years.

The silver lining, at least as far as Jet Set Radio goes, is that if you have both an Xbox 360 or PS3 and 10 American dollars, you can play it (remastered in HD) right now! Hurry up and do that before someone de-lists it. If you haven’t played it, I hope you’ll check it out - suffice it to say, at the time of its release there was truly nothing like this. Arguably, there still isn’t.

Next week’s game (our 75th!) is another beloved late-90s classic, since the Retro Roulette gods seem to like me now. I hope you’ll swing in, or perhaps fly or hover your way here, for next week’s blog. 

[retro-roulette]

Retro Roulette #82: Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (Game Boy, 1994)

Oh crap, I need to find out if I have a Game Boy that works. Let’s see...

Whew! Here it is, in all its barely visible glory.

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 is the first game ever to feature Wario as a playable character. He was introduced as a villain the previous game in this series, 6 Golden Coins, and was apparently enough of a hit that they *immediately* put him front and center. I’ve never quite understood the appeal, to be honest.

The story of the first few Super Mario Land games is amusingly interconnected - during the events of the first game, in which Mario is in an unusual kingdom called Sarasaland, Wario took over Mario Land and steals its namesake castle. Super Mario Land 2 is all about undoing that, and at its end, order is restored when Wario is expelled from the castle. Undeterred, Wario resolves to get a castle of his own, which will be cooler and better than Mario’s, which brings us to this week’s game.

This game also introduced Captain Syrup, the first female villain of the overarching Mario universe. She was also the villain of Wario Land II, but hasn’t hasn’t shown up in much since.

If you’ve played literally any Mario game, you should have a good idea of how this works - Mar...sorry, Wario - jumps on platforms and enemies, collects coins, and tries not to die. Like his less evil counterpart, Wario can dash to move more quickly, and can collect a handful of different powerups. He’s got some cool ones, too - a set of horned helmet him extra strength when barreling through things, and a winged helmet lets him fly horizontally for a pretty solid distance.

The game has an overworld reminiscent of its predecessor, or like Super Mario World. The levels themselves are just numbered, though, which is a bit frustrating - this makes it needlessly tough to, say, remember a particular level that you enjoyed. Even considering how the game is somewhat hampered by the limits of the Game Boy, a lot of the levels feel fairly uninspired, and most are disappointingly easy. There are a lot of them to play through, though, and they’re certainly well-made, but this falls a bit short of feeling like a big, varied Mario release.

In general, the bar for top tier Mario-adjacent games is very, very high - to no fault of its own, Wario Land doesn’t really belong in that tier. It’s a pretty fun game, though - I’d especially recommended for a young retro gamer who wants to work up to a bigger challenge. It’s a great pick for that.

Wario Land was, as you can probably guess, a pretty big hit - it made the character a mainstay of the Mario universe and spawned numerous sequels of its own, including what is probably the best game for the Virtual Boy, the appropriately named Virtual Boy Wario Land.

Let this serve as a reminder that literally all Virtual Boy games look like that. Wario’s popularity also led to the creation of the delightful WarioWare series, which generally consists of a series of frantic, weird micro-games. While I don’t know that I’ve ever fully gotten the appeal of Wario himself, WarioWare is easily one of my favorite Nintendo franchises.

Next week’s game is a 16-bit racer that I apparently own but have never heard of. That might be good? You can’t say it won’t be. Here’s hoping you’ll come back to find out.

[retro-roulette]

Retro Roulette #89: Kid Kool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs (NES, 1990)

I’m back from vacation, and it’s time to play...whatever this is. This can’t actually be its name, can it?

Oh god, it is. Alright, let’s see what we’ve got here.

Kid Kool was released by Vic Tokai for the NES in 1990, and adapted from a Japanese version that was released a couple of years earlier. The game’s central character is a kid based on a real life Japanese child actor who somehow hit it big impersonating a specific baseball player (which is so ridiculous, I couldn’t make it up if I tried). He is also, apparently, very kool.

Just so cool. Or kool, rather. The game is a rather straight forward platformer, without a ton of bells and whistles. You jump on enemies, over gaps, and so forth. On occasion, you get a little red guy who you can throw at enemies, which makes things measurably easier at times (and he boomerangs back to you, which is handy).

You might think that description probably doesn’t sound like much, and you’d be right. If this were exceptionally well-executed, it’d probably still be a decent game, but Kid Kool is...not a decent game. Movement and level design are critical aspects of any good platformer, and both have serious issues. The game’s title kid struggles to jump forward without a significant amount of momentum, meaning that if you didn’t get to much of a running start you probably won’t jump as far as you wanted (possibly even effectively jumping straight up), which means you’ll probably die. The game’s levels do a poor job of accounting for this, and task you with making jumps that are needlessly frustrating. The game’s second level begins with a jump so large that you can’t see where you’ll need to land as you take off, which is just preposterous.

The game also apparently has a night/day mode, which changes some aspects of the game. However, this only changes once every real-time hour of gameplay. Considering the above, I’m guessing very few people even tolerated the game long enough to discover this mechanic (and I don’t blame them). While the concept is interesting, it’s not executed in a way that’s even remotely workable. Nothing about this game makes sense.

Ultimately, Kid Kool is about as misleadingly named as a video game can get. It’s a dull, frustrating game that mildly resembles Super Mario Bros., though it’s worse in every conceivable way. It’s clear what Vic Tokai was going for, but this is just an unenjoyable mess.

Despite not being especially well-liked by anyone Kid Kool received a couple of spiritual sequels. One of those games is Decap Attack, a Genesis exclusive that is actually quite good! You can play that in a few different Genesis compilation releases, including the recent Sega Genesis Classics for modern consoles.

Next week, we’re sticking with another action-y platformer on the NES, though I’m pretty sure this one isn’t hot garbage. It even has dinosaurs, so you’ve got that to look forward to. I’ll see you then.

[retro-roulette]

Retro Roulette #97: Destiny of an Emperor (NES, 1990)

I feel like an emperor’s destiny is to be, like, an emperor. Right? I feel like it’s fairly straight forward.

1990′s Destiny of an Emperor is a strategy RPG by Capcom based on the historical manga Tenchi wo Kurau (which has the much cooler meaning “The Devouring of Heaven and Earth”). Capcom managed to make four entirely different games based on it, including the arcade beat-em-ups Warriors of Fate and Dynasty Wars. The story is based on the classical Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is itself the subject of a super popular Koei series that now has...let’s see...*checks* 13 entries now?! That’s almost 40 kingdoms! Such history.

Unlike some of its brethren, this is not a beat-em-up game. Not by a long shot. Destiny of an Emperor is an RPG, along the lines of the early Dragon Warrior games. It looks something like this:

Hang on, that’s the wrong Destiny.

No, that’s...somehow even more wrong.

No!

Okay, there we go. That looks like Dragon Warrior alright. At the start of the game, you start with a few solid generals and are tasked with fighting of bandits, recruiting more/better generals, and then repeat that process as you get stronger, get better items, and so forth. You’ll need to make sure your armies are fed and well-equipped. If you know how RPGs work, you get the idea.

The game’s combat looks a lot like similar 8- and 16-bit games in the genre, with ‘tactics’ taking the place of the “spellcasting” that you normally see. Those can be very handy at times, but more often than not I found myself sticking with standard attacks and having good luck with those. As a result, while I appreciated the quantity of available options, the game started to feel tedious quite quickly. This is more of a matter of personal taste, but I also found the setting to be a bit more dull than Dragon Warrior and its ilk - at least in the latter, you’re killing cute slimes and so forth. This one feels a bit more like looking at a spreadsheet, which I do enough at work.

While it can be a bit repetitive and lacking the fantastical stuff that most other RPGs do, Destiny of an Emperor is well-executed and has a good amount of fun to offer if you’re willing to put in the work. There are a lot of characters to talk to recruit, defeat, and so on. That ultimately means that it’s impressive, but not for everyone (or even a majority of gamers, realistically). If the above sounds appealing to you, though, I’d say go for it.

As another aside, one of my favorite things about playing second-hand copies of old games is that sometimes you’ll come across an old save file that makes you laugh hysterically:

Heh.

Next week’s game is a 16-bit action title that I know nothing about, but it seems 90s as heck. Is that good? Probably not, but we’ll find out together.