Tag: SNES

Fuss from the bus, pain from the train… Public transport? It’s a load of monkey business

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Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble (1996)

Life without a car suits a recluse like me down to the ground, you know, but it is quickly getting impractical. I never much liked driving anyway – even though the car I was driving was worth precisely nothing, naught, nada, I still felt I was only ever seconds or metres away from a cash that would have bankrupted me, or at least made the insurers laugh at me down the phone like when Patrick Bateman tries to book Dorsia.

Actually, it wasn’t just the money, or even the aggravation associated with trying to swap insurance details with a not-particularly-law-abiding chap twice my size. No, if I’d gotten into a wreck with that car, it would have opened up like a tin of beans. From that day forward, I would become half-metal, half-man, or more accurately I’d need a coffin shaped like a swastika to be able to fit inside.

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Mystery of the menus, curse of the cursors, the death of design

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Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem (1994)

I don’t know if we’ve just become spoilt by the wealth of apps and online services available nowadays, but is it my imagination or are user interfaces and user experiences getting worse and worse? Strangely, it also seems to me that there’s a growing abundance of money in UX / UI Designer jobs. Perhaps this means they’re throwing more money than in God’s wallet at the problem, but it’s still to no avail.

You take the video streaming services, and we pretty much have them all as we’re awful couch potatoes. Well, you try and search for something on Netflix and you can forget it. The search function is slow, sometimes difficult to find, and the thing you’re searching for is either not there (but here are dreadful knock-offs, a classic Netflix move. Or your desired result is buried beneath a load of child porn-enabling series and other bleeding heart liberal rubbish.

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Using your SNES as a learning tool? I must be missing the point

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Mario is Missing! (1993)

If you’re anything like me, then you’ll have been living your life dodging as much responsibility as humanly possible. After all, what good can possibly come out of having responsibility? Talk about putting an enormous target on your back, and inviting mouthbreathers to come up and take their best shot at you. Putting yourself in the hot seat may confer you with riches, adulation and fame – but it won’t be long before someone tries to knock you off your perch, or worse, they all come to you looking for a clue. And who needs that kind of pressure?

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Trust me when I say, there’s no reason to time-travel back to ’93

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Mario’s Time Machine (1993)

There’s one very simple, selfish reason why I don’t want time-travel to be invented; because it just wrecks all credibility in any given story. Honestly, if fiction has taught us anything, it’s that if you introduce time travel to your book, film or pornographic magazine, there’s no coming back from it. They did time travel in Harry Potter, and it was a nonsense, all kinds of new plot holes everywhere until J.K. Rowling sensibly had the Time Turners destroyed entirely.

They brought time travel into Artemis Fowl as well, although this was a few books after the initial craze had died down, and the Disney-backed film was so badly thought out that time travel may even have saved it, if we could have only gone back in time and destroyed the workprints first.

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There’s plenty to click, and it’s not much of a drag either

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Mario & Wario (1993)

To this day, I still can’t decide whether or not I like mice. I’m not talking about computer mice, to which I’m fairly ambivalent. I’m certainly a lot more ambivalent about them than an old boss of mine who was from an age before computers, and therefore distrusted them immensely. He’d pull the old wired mouse around his desk like he was trying to start a lawnmower, and he only ever called it “the rat” in a low grunt. You’ll know the difference between mice and rats if your cats ever bring them in, that’s for sure. Here’s a tip – rats are a bit more chewy.

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Either you’re a Mega Man, or it’ll be the Bass that got away

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Mega Man & Bass (2003)

Men live in their own delusions, you know, because it’s the only thing that keeps us from giving up. This really comes to the fore when you’ve got a new woman in your sights. You fancy a bit of her, and in your deluded state, you think that you’ve got a chance. But why would you? She will have bundles of interest from all kinds of male suitors, so what sets you apart from the pack? Nice guy? Unblemished record of holding doors open? You even open your wallet to buy them a drink every now and then? All well and good,lad, but you’re gonna need a bit more than that.

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Yes, she was Luke’s sister, but that gold bikini…

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Super_Return_of_the_Jedi_(USA,Europe)

Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1995)

I’d always felt that Star Wars: Return of the Jedi got a bit of a raw deal. There was no Internet or any other poison like that in 1983, but I still can’t imagine what kind of hype must have been bubbling for this film, a film tasked with bringing the Star Wars series to a boil, after A New Hope stuck the kettle on and The Empire Strikes Back turned up the heat.

You’re trying to wrap up two films that floored viewers when they came out, and you’re tasked with bringing everything to a close. The audience will naturally be disappointed by the film’s presence itself, in that it’s the last one and there’s not gonna be any more Star Wars. So much for all that, eh?

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A sword on the ground, a God in the clouds, a pox on the populace

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actraiser

ActRaiser (1993)

I’ve had manys a job in my time, you know. I’ve managed a theme park, briefly. I swear, you bring in thousands of children a week without getting a hint of recogition, but five or six go missing and suddenly the newspapers can’t get enough of it – not for me, thanks. I followed that up with a stint in town planning, but I had to knock that on the head as well.

Those citizens were driving me up the wall, going on about open sewers or something, and they kept opposing my plan for a downtown public incinerator. Once I began emblazoning my face on every billboard, poster and bus-stop I could find, and announced my intention to create a Ministry of Truth, the game was up.

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A man and his dog is a bond that lasts forevermore

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Secret_of_Evermore_Logo

Secret of Evermore (1996)

Although I do like cats more, I definitely agree with the assertion that dogs are a man’s best friend. Yes, I know there’s some dogs out there that are specifically trained to kill on sight, and won’t even consider easing their jaws until you’ve become dead meat. Well, those doggies aren’t your friends. But you know those lovably dumb dogs that follow you everywhere, always want to know what you’re doing, and get all over-excited when you come home. You couldn’t invent a better pet if you tried, could you?

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You’ll need the balls of Han Solo if you’re going to take on the whole Empire yourself

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super empire strikes back

Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1994)

I remember it well: I was an ignorant young child of about six or seven years old, doing pretty well on Super Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back for SNES until hitting a wall in the Battle of Hoth level – or hitting the legs of the Imperial Walkers, more likely. There I was, shooting a million laser blasts into the things, and getting absolutely nowhere.

It really could have been a million laser blasts I fired as well, because I didn’t do anything else as a child except play games. Only a child could have that level of patience and determination. Thoroughly defeated, I asked that font of gaming knowledge, my older brother, for some help. And he told me that I had to use the tow cable to bring the big daddies down, just like the movie. To which I replied in utmost shock: “There’s a movie?!?”

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