Exposing my socks to the world

Rayman. Wow. I don’t even know where to begin. My only experience with the Rayman franchise is on the demo disc that came with my Dreamcast. From that experience, I thought that the series could do at least one thing well: look really good.



The Good



Rayman Arena has been or will be released for just about every modern console on the planet. All the different versions, I imagine, are pretty close to the same, but I’m not going to compare them. I’d have to buy them all, or at the very least rent them all, and that’s not on the agenda. I checked it twice to be sure.



Rayman Arena plays as a pretty solid game. There are two modes to choose from: Race and Battle. In Race mode, you take control of one of the trademarked characters from the Rayman 2 universe and run around a track. The first to make 3 laps wins. Easy. I only played the first 3 race stages. By myself. The races themselves are nicely done. I enjoyed playnig the stages on practice mode, but got spanked when I tried to play against the computer. Battle mode is a little different. It’s 1v1 (or 1v1v1 [or 1v1v1v1]) with one of 3 goals: Grab the shiny thing (Lums), Beat Each Other Senseless, and Hold on to the Shiny Thing for as Long as Possible. Grab the Shiny Thing is pretty straightforward. The only weapon you get is the ice…something. It freezes your enemies in place for a few seconds. It’s borderline fun. Beat Each Other Senseless is a little more action oriented. Don’t go into the match expecting Unreal Tournament Deathmatch, and you won’t be horribly disappointed. Each of the players gets 5 ‘life points.’ Knock off all 5 of them and you get a point. 5 points wins. There’s weapons all over the place, but you won’t know what they are until you actually pick them up, so you will have a hard time staying away from the lamer items. I got bored before I played HOTTSTFALAP, so here’s a picture of me waking up at a LAN party.



Rayman Arena PC looks pretty decent. The game has modest enough system requirements that it will run well on a lot of computers. I poked around the menus for several minutes and couldn’t find a place to jack up the level of detail in the game. But as it is, it didn’t make my eyes run away in terror, so it’s acceptable.

The box for the game claims that it supports LAN play, but I couldn’t convince anyone else to get a copy, so I’ll just have to take the box’s word for it.



The Not So Good

Rayman Arena has an inconsistant control setup. why the designers decided that there should be one setup for Race and another for Battle is beyond me. I get used to one scheme, and then have to switch it up for the other mode. The designers were gracious enough to let you configure the controls to your liking, but using the mouse+keyboard combo, I couldn’t get them both to the same.



Rayman Arena also comes on two discs. No big deal, right? The copy-protection scheme, however introduces a whole host of headaches. Well, really just one. When you start the game, it does the obligatory CD check. But here’s the fun part: you have to put in both CDs. You can reduce this annoyance by putting the second CD in a second drive, but if you don’t have one… well, just get used to switching them out.



The Verdict



Overall, this game is not too bad. I’m sure if you had some friends with this game at a LAN party somewhere, it’d be a great way to pass a few minutes. I’ve played worse games. For that matter, I own worse games.



Title:Rayman Arena

By:Ubi Soft

Price I paid for it: $3.31

Price I would be willing to pay for it now: $3
Grade: 7 out of 10. This game would be a world better with a unified control shceme and without that annoying CD check.

AAW – Alive And Well
AISL – After I Stop Laughing

AFK – Away From Keyboard

AYST – After You Stop Talking

CTF – Cheaper Than Free
DLTH – Don’t Listen To Him (Her)

DMMKU – Don’t Make Me Kick yoU

DYHAP – Do You Have A Point(?)

GAFM – Get Away From Me
IC – I’m Confused

ICTT – I Can’t Type Today

IDC – I Don’t Care

ITF – In The Face

IHMC – I Hate My Computer
IYPKB – Is Your Period Key Broken(?)

IYSS – If You Say So
FTMTN – For The Millionth Time, No

FTTTN – For The Thousandth Time, No

GAFM – Get Away From Me

GTB – Going To Bed
IASG – I Ate Something Gross

IDC – I Don’t Care

IDK – I Don’t Know

IDTS – I Don’t Think So

IUOK – If yoU Only Knew
IYL – It’s Your Loss

IYSS – If You Say So
MBFA – My Butt Fell Asleep

MFG – Mining For Gold
MMGB – My Mind’s Gone Blank

NEIYPM – Not Even If You Paid Me
OIYWW – Only If You Want (to) Win
OOTH – Out Of The House

OOYM – Out Of Your Mind

PTMYJ – Please Tell Me You’re Joking

QBS – Quit Being Stupid
SIPO – Sorry, I Passed Out

TAS – Take A Shower

TWTF – That Was Too Funny
WTB – Went To Bed

WTN – Way Too n00b, or What The n00b

YCBS – You Can’t Be Serious

YDWN – You Don’t Want (to) Know


There we go, just a sampling of the many many acronyms floating around the IRC channels. Happy chatting!

Sometimes while browsing my local game stores, I run across some games that are attractively priced. To put it another way, I look for cheap games. Often, if the price of the game is less than $5, I will put some serious thought into buying it. Sometimes the games I get are well worth the money. Other times they really aren’t. Here’s a sample of ten games that I found for $5 of less. My hope is that this list will convince you if you want to be a Seeker of the Value Software Titles.

#10

Mystic Towers

Format: PC

Price I paid for it: $3.00

Mystic Towers is a game about an old man-wizard that has to make his way through towers filled with deadly monsters. At least that’s what the back of the case says. It’s my understanding that there is a level 2, and possibly a level 3, but I suck too bad at it to get past level 1.

To keep your wizard friend alive, you have to not only eat the food that just happens to be laying around all over the floor, you also get to make him drink the water from the toilet-shaped fountains that are all over the place.

The one thing that stands out about this game, aside from the hideously difficult quest itself, is that occasionally (and by occasionally I mean all the time) Mr. Wizard will fart with a mischievous grin on his face. Now I don’t know who came up with this marvelous innovation, but I hope he got a raise for this visionary idea. It would be years before another company realized the genius of the fart and turned it into a weapon in the Boogerman franchise.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)
Old men farting is never not funny.

#9

Tamagotchi
Format: Game Boy
Price I paid for it: $5

Tamagotchi was a fad that lasted from approximately the Summer of 1998 to the Fall of 1998, and in that time, Bandai was able to sell about 300 billion of the little virtual pet key chains to the world. Not content with the freakishly large pile of money that it got from this, they decided to make a version of it for the
Game Boy. Whereas the keychain version restricted you to one Tamagotchi at a time, the Game Boy one let you ‘care for’ three of the freaky things at a time.

So what do you do with your Tamagotchi? Well, you can feed it, you can study with it, you can play ball with it, and you can play the ‘Smile Game’ with it. Anyone that tells you that raising a virtual pet is easy never played this ‘game’. The three games that you have to play with your Tamagotchi are a chore to sit through, and even more of a chore to play every single day, and it’s not like real days either. Every day in Tamagotchi World passes in about 3 hours, so most of the time you get to sit there watching whatever thing you’re growing bounce around until you decide to play with it. Each of the games that you can play will increase one of its meters (the Intelligence Meter, the Athletic Meter, and the Happy Meter). Why would you want to increase the meters? Once a day, you can enter your Tamagotchi in a contest to see if it’s the fastest, cutest, or smartest. I’ve played through several Tamagotchis and every single one of them that I’ve raised has been slow, ugly, and stupid. I’ve tried to raise them in different ways, and this site claims that there’s more adult Tamagotchi than the one pathetic one that I always end up with, but I stopped believing anything that I read on the Internet a long time ago.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

Not even potty-training your Tamagotchi can make this game good. I wanted to flush this game about an hour after I got it.

#8

Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Format: PC
Price I Paid for it: $0.89

Don’t Quit Your Day Job is supposed to be a game about getting your big break as a stand-up comedian. Your goal is to walk around the night club you work for, and talk to all the guests in a certain order. If you talk to them in the wrong order, you get dropped to the basement where you get to play some game or other to get out and then you get to continue where you left off.

One of the things that makes this game so great is the fact that you get absolutely no clues as to who you talk to next. Honestly, when a game tells me what I have to do, it makes the game entirely too easy, especially when there’s about a dozen or so people that you could talk to at any given time, and only one won’t throw you in the basement.

Once you finally muster the courage to actually ‘talk’ to someone, you get treated to a short Quicktime movie of them doing… something (apparently funny according to the manual. They must have left the humor out of my copy.), and if it’s the right person in the chain, then you get some comedy item like a Fire Extinguisher or a Banana Peel, and then you get to talk to someone else, get thrown in the basement, get out of the basement, talk to someone, get thrown in the basement, get out of the basement, talk to someone, get comedy item, etc. etc.

This game was made shortly after the advent of ‘CD-ROM’ and ‘Quicktime’ technology, and they are married here in a union of crap. The disc itself is crammed full of short llittle movies of rndom ‘comedians’ performing ‘comedy’. Trust me, if you are unfortunate enough to own this game, you will get all of the value of the game by browsing the contents of the CD, then using the disc itself to clean out the cracks in the sidewalk in front of your house. Yes, the game is that good

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

#7

KISS Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child
Format: Dreamcast
Price I paid for it: $0.99

This game is among the worst that I’ve played. I don’t know how this game managed to get out the door with this much suck in it.
I really have no idea what this game is supposed to be about. I played a little of the first level and got so frustrated at the controls that I just started to run directly into the ridiculously weak enemies to put myself out of my misery.

You start off with one of the members of the band in street clothes (sorry, I’m not any kind of KISS fan, so I can’t tell you who) and you need to find all the pieces of your KISS armor to do… whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing. I’m sure there’s more band members and more costume pieces in the game or something, but I don’t think I’ll ever want to play this game again.

Now, in a game that has a band as the stars, you might be thinking to yourself, “Wow, KISS in their own video game. Sweet! That means I can run around gutting aliens while I listen to their music.” Sure, it sounds good, but the makers of this game decided to not do that. The game has in it some really bad ambient sounds
and music, and in every level there is a jukebox that contains *one record* that has on it about *30 seconds* of a KISS song, and thanks to the creative visionaries that crafted this fine game, you can only hear the song while you are standing next to the jukebox. So you would think that this would give you some super powers like invincibility, or invisibility, or a giant alien stomping foot, or something like that, but no, it just makes you stand there
and listen to one riff of the song for a little while before you have to go slaughter more ‘things’

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

I’d rate it lower, but my gauge doesn’t go that low.

#6

Jazz Jackrabbit Episodes 2, 3, and 4
Format: PC (DOS)
Price I paid for it: $3.99

Now this is an odd collection. I suppose the thinking of this was that Episode 1 was already installed on every computer in the universe at the time it was released. Episode one was shareware, and every computer you went to had this game on it, well either this or you spent time playing gorillas.bas. Of course by the time I actually bought a computer, episode one wasn’t even available any more, so I played it after completing these…

Jazz Jackrabbit, for those of you who don’t know, was a knockoff of the Sonic the Hedgehog games, with the following exceptions:

You control a green rabbit instead of a blue hedgehog
Instead of jumping/rolling into enemies, you use your shoulder mounted bazooka to blow them up. You fight a turtle trying to rule the universe instead of a fat man trying to rule the world.

Really, the game itself looks and plays well enough. The levels are huge and take forever to complete. They are full of enemies and ammo for your gun, and that’s about it. The different ‘planets’ offer different backgrounds, but the game is still the same: run around 3 huge levels for an hour, kill the turtle at the end, go to the next planet.

Epic knows how to build a platform game and there are lots of platforms in this game. In fact you will spend more time jumping between them than anything else in this game. In fact, unless you have some affection with pressing the ‘fire’ button a lot, you’ll have entirely too much ammo for the ‘army’ in this game.

So you get through episodes 2, 3, and 4 and then what? I don’t know. The game itself spans 10 episodes, and I wasn’t about to pay anyone for the rest of the series after I got ripped off buying this game.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

The game is kind of fun for a while until you figure out that you aren’t actually doing anything.

#5

Jet Grind Radio
Format: Dreamcast
Price I paid: $4.99

When the SEGA finally killed off the Dreamcast, some of the games for the system became too cheap to pass up. I’m glad I found this one when I did, because at the time I bought it, it was going for $9.99 used (Such a dilemma)

Right, Jet Grind Radio. Okay, this is a strange game. The story goes something like this: Your character (Beat {fantastic choice for a name, SEGA}) wants to start a skating gang. So he challenges a couple of people that just happen to handy to contests. He wins, they join, and then they hit the streets spray-painting everything in sight with his gang’s graffiti, covering up the graffiti of their rival gangs. So all’s right with the world, until the police decide to try and stop you.

Now I’ve never actually been to Tokyo, so I don’t have first hand experience of how things work there, but if this game is any indication, the police has the authority to pull out the heavy artillery for any type of violation. All we have going on in this city is gangs fighting each other with spray paint. The police have on their side Storm Troopers, Riot Squads that shoot tear gas, Assault Helicopters, and Tanks. Of course, these are superhuman kids of the future. They take several shots from a military grade tank before they fall down and faint.

The game continues like this for a while. Paint graffiti on walls, paint graffiti on rival gang members, paint graffiti on the police, etc. We aren’t looking at a realistic skating game here, just a few gangs of kids who want to show their art to the world.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

How can gang wars between invincible kids with spray paint not be a good game?

#4

The Dame Was Loaded
Format: PC (DOS)
Price I paid for it: $0.89

The Dame Was Loaded is a game that’s patterned after games like Shadowgate and Déjà Vu. It takes place in the 1940’s and places you in the role of a detective who gets caught in the middle of a conspiracy to frame him for a murder. The whole story is told from the detective’s point of view and everything is seen through his eyes through a mix of static screens and full screen video. Now, honestly, the video doesn’t look so great. It’s displayed in 256 colors, but as any enormous box of Crayolas will tell you, there are more than 256 colors in the world. A lot more. Once you get into the game, it really doesn’t bother you as much as you might think.

Everything in the game looks authentic enough. The cars look old, and the food at the diner looks… gross. It’s also easy enough to tell the males from the females, which is imperative for any game. The actors, all of whom I’ve never heard of, did an adequate job. Let’s just leave it at that.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

This game is so big that it spans 2 discs. It also doesn’t hurt that I like this kind of game.

#3

Crazy Taxi 2
Format: Dreamcast
Price I Paid for it: $4.99

Unless you live in a cave, you know what Crazy Taxi is. If you do live in a cave, you don’t have a computer and probably are at a friend’s house reading this. So for the cave dwellers, here is a quick run-down of what Crazy Taxi is. Crazy Taxi is a game where you, the cabbie, have to pick up customers and take them to where they want to go.

How boring does that sound?

Luckily, though, the game’s a little more complicated than that, and a whole lot more fun. You get tips for aggressive driving (driving down the wrong side of the road for example), as well as performing stunts (jumping over buildings or parked cars, or sliding around a curve). In fact, you have to do the stunts to get your customers to where they actually want to go in the time that they give you to get there.

I could go on for pages and pages about how much I want to have this game’s baby, so let’s just end it here before I say something that I might embarrass myself with.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars) So good I forget to eat or sleep while I’m playing it.

#2

Bubble Bobble Also Featuring Rainbow Islands
Format: PC (DOS)
Price I Paid for it: $3.00

Bubble Bobble is possibly the strangest game that I’ve ever played. You are a dinosaur, you blow bubbles around your enemies, you pop the bubbles and the flying walruses or whatever you are fighting turn into food, you eat it, you go to the next level. I just can’t seem to get into a game like this. Sure, the challenge is there, but you have to do the same thing for 100 levels. 100 levels is more than my tolerance for freakystrange games will allow me to bear.

Rainbow Islands is the sequel to Bubble Bobble somehow. Maybe it’s because I never finished Bubble Bobble, but I can’t tell how these games are supposed to be related. In Rainbow Islands, you are a little boy instead of a dinosaur. Instead of blowing bubbles, you create these little rainbows over your enemies and then walk across them to make them crash down on the head of whatever overly cute lethal animal is on your level.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

I just don’t get it.

#1
Super Tennis
Format: SNES
Price I paid for it: $0.97
Super Tennis is one of the first games ever made for the SNES. In it, you play the fine game of Tennis beautifully rendered on your screen by the graphical powerhouse that is the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

The options that this game provides are truly amazing. You get to pick your tennis player from a wide selection of, I think it’s 8, players, each offering a unique combination of shirt and short color. You can select what type of court you’d like to play on, and you can even change the color of the ball if you decide that you can’t see the ball on the color of court that you’ve chosen.

All in all, it’s a good Tennis game to just pick up and play, just don’t expect it to be a simulation along the lines of “Super Tennis Tweaker 2000”.

Rating (Out of 10 Stars)

It was worth the dollar.

5. gut punch wrestling. I tried this search on Google and didn’t see my site in the top 30 pages it spit back at me. Maybe someone is using some other search engine.



4. dance dance revolution aim expressions. My site pops up 4th on the first page of this query. Unfortunately I don’t have a clue what it’s supposed to mean. Someone enlighten me

3. wrestling maneuvers. Well, Google still didn’t turn up anything site related, but I know people keep getting this page where I tried to document every wrestling move ever performed. Why would anyone want to look up a page describing the Inverted Atomic Drop is beyond me.



2. nes advantage. YES! My site comes up at the top of the page for anybody looking for information on the best NES controller ever. Too bad all they get is my ode.



1. funny surveys. This one baffles me. Well, moreso than all the others. This search phrase brought three times the people that #2 did. Do peoele really want to take funny surveys that bad?



Okay, after analyzing the top 5 search queries, it’s obvious that people want to see a funny survey about wrestling, the NES Advantage, and DDR AIM expressions, so I have compiled one on your right. Please vote accordingly.

Now, I like NES stuff as much as the next guy. I do own three of the things. Apparently, someone decided to amass a huge collection of the games for the system and then sell the whole pile on eBay.



The winning bid was somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000, or about $10 per game.



I just hope the guy selling them didn’t get all those games brand new.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I suck at text adventure games. I must have invested eight or nine thousand hours in Skullduggery: Adventures in Horror and I never made anything resembling progress in that game. I don’t know what it is, maybe I just don’t understand how things are supposed to work in games like that. I want an unlimited inventory. If I have to kill a Vampire Cocker Spaniel with a banana shaped bowl filled with lime Jell-O, then there should be a book or something telling me that. Things like that aren’t normally come to mind when I’m playing games.



That being said, there’s a place online where you can play a versoion of the ‘classic’ game that ‘hardcore’ ”gamers” still giggle about, Zork.

Ever play a game that you just couldn’t finish? Maybe it’s just sadistically hard, or maybe you had to take it back to the rental store. Whatever the case, this site has several endings available for you to look at so you can say that you have finished whatever game you suck at.

Nothing like a Memorial Day of doing absolutely nothing to wear a guy out.


What’s a good way to pass the time on a national holiday? I don’t have any idea. I used it primarily to finally finish up The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, so now I’m looking for something else to keep my gaming lobe occupied. Maybe I need to jump back on the Pok