Go over to my YouTube channel at www.YouTube.com/RadicalRomReviews! That's where all the action's at, d00d.

Read More......

Ah, well geez. Hey.

I could give any number of excuses - I was originally going to simply say that I was visited by a strange creature that says I must find the Eight Stones of Aramath to fulfill my destiny and save the kingdom, with nothing to help me but my wits, a slightly magical sword, and this handy group of sidekicks - but the simple fact of the matter is that blogging has been pushed to the sideline due to other minor life concerns, such as making enough money to support my family and such.

So, what does the future hold? Eh, who knows. I certainly won't be abiding by any rigid posting schedule, that's for damn sure (what was I thinking? I know myself better than that. Hell, I have a whole closet full of pocket calender/organizers with only one week filled out in each, despite my initial resolve with each of them that they were the answer to my unreliable and disorganized lifestyle). Maybe I'll just drop it altogether, but I really do love blogging, so I hope not. More than likely I'll just post sporadically until I either decide to call it quits or dedicate the necessary time to it.

Whatever the case, I'm not going to let this thing be any kind of burden to me. I used it initially as a place to catalog my thoughts on the various roms I was playing through, and if anything that's what it will go back to. I got so tied up in the exciting possibility of actually being a blog that people read that I didn't slow down to realize that I was having to cripple other more important parts of my life in order to accommodate for that.

Ego bruised and slightly shaken, I soldier on. Or not. Who knows. If this is my last post, then at least I can say that it's been a fun ride. And if it's not, then...well, I guess I'll see you there.

- Frankie Leet

Read More......

As any R3 regular knows, I'm a sucker for unrealistic sports games. While some might say that fact makes me more lenient towards games of that genre, it's actually quite the opposite - I've played most every noteworthy arcadey sports game out there, and don't have time to put up with any bull****.

In other words, I don't have the time to put up with Back Street Soccer.



Or rather, I didn't. But then I made time. I forced it in there against my will just for the sake of warning people of this simple fact: there are some great arcadey sports games on MAME, but this ain't one of 'em.

The things I do for y'all, I swear...


It would be easy for your average layperson to be initially optimistic about Back Street Soccer (fool!), as elements are present that point towards competency: decent Neo-Geo style graphics (er, well, we'll get to that in a second), simple control scheme, "wild" teams to choose from that always have at least one guy with a mohawk (wheee!), and gravity defying super moves. Unfortunately the graphics are ripped-off, the controls don't allow for gameplay resembling that elusive "fun" I hear some games produce, there are serious WTF moments when choosing your team, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to pull off the special moves. Allow me to tackle these issues in reverse.

When I first started playing BSS, I noticed that the computer was pwning me with these super fancy moves - kickups, jukes, ridiculous and impossible to stop power shots, crazy looking headers and one-timers, that kind of thing. Naturally, my first goal was to find out how to pull these things off. I never succeeded.

Now, maybe this puts a stain on my credibility in your eyes. Maybe someone will promptly email me or post a comment that explains how to do them. But let me tell you something: I've been a hardcore gamer for the past couple of decades. I've been there to experience all the types of ways special moves have been pulled off through the years. I've held buttons, double tapped them, did various joystick movements combined with button presses, pressed multiple buttons together, held one button while tapping another, held buttons while inputting joystick commands, and overall just tried everything until I figure out how things work. And if none of those things work, I look online to figure it out.

Alas, my efforts were no match against Back Street Soccer, and the special moves still elude me. I also can't find anything on the internet that explains how to do them, or indeed has any reference to them ever being pulled off by an actual human being. There's a total of one video on YouTube that makes any reference to the game, and he can't figure out how to do them either.

So at this point, as far as I'm concerned, they're there just to rub it in your face that you could (and should) be playing a much better game.



The next thing might not seem like that big of a deal, but it was enough to piss me off.

The first time I went to the team select screen, I noticed that it was a whole lot like the one found in Street Hoops, with each country having a team made up of four or five pallet-swapped character sprites. That's fine, at least it gives each team some kind of personality. The thing is, when I started rotating through the different countries, the team that displayed didn't change. So I stayed on one team for a bit to see if there was just some lag, and yes, the displayed players did change. And then they changed again. Problem was, I still hadn't moved my curser.

Yes, the team it shows actually has no bearing on which team you select. It cycles randomly at fixed intervals, and once you get into the game, your team will consist of different characters and a different uniform.

You might not think that's a huge deal, but it's something that really sums up the game as a whole. Sloppy, unfinished design mixed with an astounding lack of originality and utter absence of gameplay cohesion.


As far as the controls go, there isn't much to say other than they suck. Passes are inconsistent and rarely achieve what you wanted them to. Shots are also inconsistent, leaving you with no input on how you want to attack the goal. Lobbing the ball to yourself is pointless since it's so slow that it becomes a 50-50 toss up between you and the computer. Headers and footers are way too hard to accurately pull off and require pixel-perfect accuracy, which is hard to get thanks to the stilted movement controls. Those stilted controls are further aggravated by the obscene amount of auto-controlling that happens whenever you stop holding down a direction for a millisecond. On top of all this, you have a total of one thing you can do on defense, which is tackle.

And just to push this **** storm completely over the edge, much of the sprites were stolen from the much better Street Hoops. They might have been slightly altered, but there's just no excuse for downright theft.

























Are there even any more bad things to say about this game? The graphics were stolen, the controls are ass, special moves are seemingly impossible to pull off, team selection is broken...hmm...I'm sure I can come up with something.

Well, the different teams have zero differences between them, with nothing in the way of varying attributes or special abilities...the playing field is way too tiny for the amount of characters in each game...the matches are laughably short, each lasting a whole 1:30 of in game time...the goalkeeper AI can go from God to ass in about three seconds time (I counted)...oh, and the overall AI is extremely rubber-bandy, to the point where you can often expect them to make at least a couple goals in the last 15 seconds if you're beating them.

Ass. Complete and total ass.

1/5

Read More......

Sweet Lord, here we go. Okay, so as I mentioned in last Monday's post, the Genesis had a whole lot of games come out that tried to cash in on Sonic's success. They're easy enough to spot - just look for a furry as the main character and an attempt to make the little bastard go fast through generic platforming stages. Besides a couple exceptions, these games are bad. Really bad.

Awesome Possum? It is by far the worst of them all, and I might even say that it's the very worst platform game ever released for mass consumption.




Awesome Possum hits all the major points that go to make a bad Sonic clone. Generic furry with an "attitude"? Check. Jerky scrolling that totally breaks the game's attempt at speed? Check. Sticky controls? Dear God check. Horrible level design that is confusing, impossible to navigate without constantly running into enemies you don't see until it's too late, has tons of bottomless pits and other insta-kills that you wouldn't be able to know about unless you memorized the level, and has a tile set that's repeated throughout the entire game? Check, check, check, and check.


Not content with just being a completely broken game, they also stuff that "environmental awareness" crap on you that was so popular in the early 90's. Something about deforestation or something, who cares.

What does this amount to? Nothing much, really. Your character occasionally spouts off some cheeky remark about saving the environment, your enemies are robots that have chainsaws, it's set in the rain forest, and - here's the kicker - you're given trivia questions in between levels that sometimes have something to do with being "green" (as hybrid owning pricks call it these days).


Here's a tip for developers thinking of adding some in-between level trivia: well, for one, how about don't. But if you just have to, then have some trivia that somebody might actually, you know, know the answer to. And if you can't even do that (you sick ****er), then for the love of God, take it easy on us! Don't give us an impossible question that nobody in their right mind would know and then frieking berate us like we just took a dump on your mother's chest or something.

The icing on the cake is the digitized speech. While that kind of thing was pretty novel at the time, there are a total of about 6 lines in the entire game, and your character says one of them literally about every fifteen seconds.

What more is there to say? I can't think of a better game to start Weaksauce Wednesday's off with, because this is one of the very worst ever made.

Read More......

Unlike the SNES, there isn't a huge amount of great games for the Genesis that most of the gaming community doesn't already know about. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the system. Over the years I've flip-flopped more times than I care to remember between thinking the Genesis was overall better than the SNES and vice-versa, and some of my all-time favorite games are on the system.

That said, it's just a simple fact that the Genesis doesn't have the sheer volume of great games that can be found in the SNES library. Another strike against it is that there were few games of note that didn't get translated into English at some point, and as such there has never been a large fan translation community for the system. The bad thing about that, of course, is that there aren't as many new titles to find out about that we couldn't have played back in the day.



Even still, I can't wait to do segments on games like General Chaos, Haunting starring Polterguy, Mutant League Football, and Toejam and Earl. I don't focus purely on obscure games here at R3, but I'll be the first to admit that the less well known something is, the more likely I am to cover it. I just like the idea of introducing new games to people a lot more than retreading the same old ground just for nostalgia's sake.

Fortunately, I think Bubba 'n' Stix is very likely to lean towards the former.


One likely reason that this game was/is so overlooked (outside of poor distribution) is that there were just so many poor platformers for the system that tried to cash in on Sonic. There are a couple good'ns - the classic Rocket Knight Adventures comes to mind - but mostly we're dealing with crap like Awesome Possum. So, it wouldn't be hard to imagine people assuming that Bubba 'n' Stix would be along those lines, but they would be very, very wrong.

For one, BnS is centered purely around puzzles. There is some "combat" (and I use that term loosely), but most of your time is spent working out various environmental puzzles. And oh, what puzzles they are.


The bad news is that much of what makes the puzzles difficult comes from the control scheme and finicky hit detection. Since so much of the controls revolve around context sensitive actions, you're often left trying random things to see if you can possibly interact in some way with the environment. That's then aggravated by by the hit detection, which is loose when it comes to enemies but demands pixel-perfect accuracy when dealing with other interactions. Furthermore, the controls overall are a bit sticky, and level layouts can be confusing and overwhelming.


Yeah, I know. This is supposed to be a recommendation.

...and it is. Calm down, the game's friggin' great.

Despite these myriad flaws, it's easy to fall in love with BnS. Er, well, at the very least, fall in lust...this is one damn pretty Genesis game. The colors are just outstanding, the animation is top-notch, and there's always so much going on to make the game world really feel alive.


Yeah, the puzzles are tricky, and often not for the right reasons. When puzzles are hard not because of legitimate challenge but because of poor design we're supposed to fault the game, right? Well...I don't know, but for some reason, it actually kind of works in BnS's favor. You'll be surprised at some of the ways you can interact with the environment, and many of the solutions are actually pretty clever. Overall, there's always a great sense of accomplishment after you've completed a particularly tricky one.


There's plenty of masochistic lovin' to go around in Bubba 'n' Stix, and it's sure to appeal to hardcore retro types that have a good deal of patience and a mind for these kind of puzzles. Check it out.

Read More......