8-Bit Brownie: 200 Retro Game Reviews

Review

Next up is yet another game about aerial warfare called... Aerial Warfare. As usual you fly a plane over an army camp trying to shoot down other planes. But why is the landscape so garishly brown with trees the colour of over-boiled broccoli? And why are the graphics so glitchy it takes a good few frames for it to refresh the screen?

Enemy planes fly towards you kamikaze style, trying to kill you and take themselves with you for some reason. Maybe it’s the end of a long gruelling war and they've all run out of ammunition. You shoot them. That’s it. There are no weapon powerups in this game (the inclusion of which made F-22 so much fun).

The music sounds like someone noodling about on a Casio keyboard with no structure to the composition in comparison with the other games we’ve looked at so far, though it does have a different track for the boss fights. Sound is very dull and unimaginative, and the controls are difficult to get used to and clunky enough to make you crash into buildings quite often.

It does allow you to move in three dimensions however, which is a good idea since the game happens in the air, but it’s hard to see how high you actually are and whether or not you’ll end up crashing into a building or sailing over it.

I reached the second level after destroying some kind of gigantic immobile tank, and found myself flying over a bright pink landscape. It was either that or the fighter pilot I was playing as ingested some kind of hallucinogenic drugs to liven things up a bit.

GSMGS Score

Graphics: 1 (Abysmal) Very garish and glitchy as well.

Sound FX: 2 (Poor) Very dull and unvaried.

Music: 2 (Poor) Total pap, though one bonus point for including a boss theme.

Gameplay: 2 (Poor) Clunky controls eclipse the innovation of the third dimension.

Story: 1 (Abysmal) Non-existent, and why are the enemies suicidal?

Total Score

Review

After a brief hiatus we’re back with the fifth game: our first platformer. Magic Jony (the first odd spelling of many) is a cute platform game in which you play a little guy who saves the world by swallowing up monsters inside a giant tulip he carries with him.

The game starts promisingly with several intro screens detailing the story. I’ve transcribed it here:

Because nutrition sucked by the huge monsters, sor all the plants have shriving one. This atmosphere of peace has been destroyed. The green land is becoming to wasteland. And peoples lives were also threaten by monsters. Till one day, a little hero called Jony has come up, he must defeat all these monsters by his magic flower.

It might not be grammatically correct but so far it’s the best (and only) backstory to any of these games. The game itself is quite basic but challenging enough, involving climbing up and down ladders to reach cartoonish monsters and “tulip” them. The graphics are interesting but sparse, with good animation compared to some of the other games we’ve looked at up to now. Music is the usual one tune but it’s quite interesting, a complex tune played in a minor key that emphasises the fact you’re in a wasteland overrun by weird monsters.

There is one big problem however which drags the game’s score down. It seems you progress by opening chests to find keys unlocking the next area, but I was unable to open the first chest (pictured above). I tried pressing both buttons, then pushing the joystick up and down, then explored the whole area to find no other way to progress. The monsters respawn when you leave the screen so it was impossible to kill them all and perhaps move on. Sadly it means I was unable to get any further and had to leave it at that.

GSMGS Score

Graphics: 3 (Average) Quite basic but nice art on the intro screens.

Sound FX: 2 (Poor) Not much variety here.

Music: 4 (Good) Interesting and melancholy.

Gameplay: 1 (Abysmal) Bugged.

Story: 4 (Good) The only game so far with any story whatsoever.

Total Score

Review

Today we have the lowest scoring game so far in the form of “Animal Blockes”. I thought the mis-spelled title was just a typo on the list of games, but as you can see it’s also on the title screen itself.

Animal Blockes is a very dull puzzle game. You are faced with a set of playing pieces, small blocks with an animal’s face on each one. These have to be matched as pairs by clicking on them with a pointer, which results in the pair disappearing. Once you’ve cleared all the pieces the stage ends, leaving you with nine more to get through.

The animals themselves are quite well drawn and recognisable, but the gameplay is frustrating. At the start of each stage, lots of the “blockes” cannot be clicked on with no explanation as to why, so your strategy descends into simply clicking on each of them in turn until you find a clickable one. What’s worse is that sometimes it ends abruptly with a game over screen, seemingly out of nowhere. There must be some way of painting yourself into a corner making it impossible to win, but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

There are absolutely no sound effects and as usual one looping (but quite interesting) tune. I suspect the prevalence of single tune soundtracks is due to the limited storage of the time. All in all, I can’t recommend this game at all: On seeing the title I was hoping for an animal-themed version of Tetris, but this couldn’t be further from that exciting concept.

GSMGS Score

Graphics: 4 (Good) Cute and detailed animal designs.

Sound FX: 1 (Abysmal) None at all.

Music: 3 (Average) The usual one looping tune.

Gameplay: 1 (Abysmal) A mix of boring and incomprehensible.

Story: 1 (Abysmal) It doesn’t even have any kind of progression as you complete stages.

Total Score

Review

Vanguard is the most polished and cohesive of the three games I’ve tried out so far. Another top-down view, this time of a tank rampaging through a military camp, softening it up for an army that never arrives.

It certainly looks good. Oil drums, barricades and tents dot a landscape protected by other tanks and huge gun turrets. There’s no onscreen interface, but it’s not entirely needed. You have unlimited ammo but limited lives, so a life counter would have been useful. Your tank can aim and move in only four directions but the enemies have access to eight. At first this seems primitive, but while playing you quickly realise it adds a tactical element like the limited movements of pieces in a board game. I got used to timing my movements to avoid the shots of enemy guns, daring them to fire at me then moving out and hitting them with my gunfire.

The game has six levels seen on a basic world map screen reminiscent of that of Doom. Admittedly there’s not much variation between them due to the limited number of enemy types. Occasionally a plane will fly over and drop nicely animated bombs on you however. While fun and challenging, the gameplay remains at a constant level of intensity all the way through, with no lulls or heavily intense sections.

This is accompanied (as usual) by one single piece of music on a loop. It’s more complex than the ten notes of Racing Fighter but there’s only so many times you’ll want to listen to it. Sound effects are good: everything makes a noise and the explosions are as bassy as they can be for 8-bit sound.

As you can see above, the final stage features a huge boss tank for you to destroy... except it doesn’t. The end of the game is heralded by the word “FINISH” appearing in the middle of the screen when you reach the end of stage six, after which you’re dumped back at the title screen. It’s a bit odd and makes me wonder if the two hundred games on the controller have had cuts made so they’ll fit. All things considered though, the gameplay is solid and there is a hint of story behind the action.

GSMGS Score

Graphics: 4 (Good) Nice variety of elements and the animation is good.

Sound FX: 3 (Average) Everything has a sound effect, it’s decent.

Music: 3 (Average) Another single looping tune but it’s not too bad.

Gameplay: 4 (Very Good) Genuinely challenging and fun.

Story: 3 (Average) The “world map” screen does this job.

Total Score

Review

Game two of two hundred, Racing Fighter, is an odd game. Despite the reference to racing in the title, you spend the entire game driving along a highway with suicidal enemy cars heading in your direction. Your job is to reach the checkpoint at the end of each level before running out of fuel, while shooting cars with some kind of cannon in the back of your jeep.

Visually it looks unfinished. The interface consists of white numbers representing stats that you’ll figure out for yourself during the game, as only your fuel counter is labelled. Even in early vehicle games like this you’d expect to see some kind of dashboard display with gauges, but this looks like they left their placeholder interface in the finished game.

The enemy cars drive at you attempting to kill you and themselves in the process. They can be blown up with one shot from your cannon, but after running out of ammo you’re on your own with no hope of finding pickups of any kind. Often the enemies will be numerous enough to block the way ahead and you won’t have time to take enough of them out without being killed. This makes for frustrating gameplay until you discover the exploit I found: hugging the outside lane and only destroying anyone directly in front of you. This will get you to the end of the level, but makes for quite a dull gameplay experience.

One of the strangest things is there’s no indication of how many lives you have remaining or how much of the game there is left to experience. You simply play against the same enemies each level, using one weapon, never being given the carrot of better equipment or new enemies to face. Between every few levels the game treats you to the sight of your driver enjoying a roadside dinner of BBQ chicken, which appears to be your sole motivation for surviving the next onslaught of suicidal maniacs and boring gameplay.

Sound design is awful here, the most prominent noise is that of your engine (enemy cars don’t make any sound including when firing weapons), a relentless and annoying drone that drowns out the rest of the game’s sounds entirely. However the only other sounds are your gunfire and the explosions of cars, which are actually often not played at all due to a regularly recurring bug.

The soundtrack consists of ten notes with no backing. This plays on the title screen and the roadside barbecue screen. It’s not a bad tune but there’s no mood music during the actual gameplay, leaving you with just the abovementioned engine drone. 

I can’t clearly remember how many levels I completed while reviewing Racing Fighter since the only thing that changes from one to the next is the colour of the ground alongside the road. It’s considerably less exciting than a long car journey in a hot, rocky wilderness in real life.

GSMGS Score

Graphics: 2 (Poor) Very repetitive with an unfinished interface.

Sound FX: 1 (Abysmal) A whole three effects in the game.

Music: 2 (Poor) A ten note tune on the title screen.

Gameplay: 1 (Abysmal) After one level you’ve seen all it has to offer - not a lot.

Story: 2 (Poor) You have the nightly feast as a goal, so that’s something at least.

Total Score

Review

Game one of two hundred is called F-22. I happened to know the title refers to the name of a real world fighter plane, but the title screen (above) makes it look more like some kind of space sim. What you get on starting the game however is a top-down scrolling shooter. I remember playing tons of this kind of thing on the family Amiga, so I eagerly dived in.

The first thing that strikes you is the theme music. Bizarrely the simple melody sounds like it could have been ripped from a cute Japanese RPG like Harvest Moon rather than composed for a serious shooter about modern air combat. The game itself is accompanied by similar themes.

Ingame, your F-22 flies over a landscape of desert islands adorned with little details like palm trees, interspersed with what look like metal oil rig-type structures. You only need one of the two buttons on the controller, which rapid-fires missiles from the plane. Enemies fly in lines from the top of the screen, bright green fighter planes that don’t shoot at you but try to ram you out of the sky while dazzling you with their synchronised flight patterns. Gun turrets on the islands fire slow-moving projectiles at you.

These guys can be dealt with quite easily by holding the fire button down and blasting them before they even appear onscreen, since there’s no limit to ammo. So far, quite boring. However things get interesting if you can grab floating pickups that look like big pink bombs. Each one you find upgrades your firepower in an original way: first allowing you to fire two missiles at once, then adding thin streams of machine gun bullets between them, and then adding bigger missiles with more interesting flight behaviour.

Each time you take damage you lose one of these upgrades, and if you’re hit when you’ve got none left you lose a life. This is quite a creative way to combine two gameplay mechanics, I thought.

The enemies all move in quite predictable ways, but with enough of them swarming around the game becomes quite challenging. After defeating the first boss, a big green heavy duty plane with heat-seekers, things start to become quite odd. You find yourself flying over some kind of volcanic landscape with what look like huge brown slugs firing glowing spheres at you. This nightmarish place is presided over by the second boss, which appears to be the huge pink head of a preying mantis.

I didn’t quite know what to make of this, but it’s possible the original game came with a manual that detailed a fantastical sci-fi back story in the vein of Metal Gear Solid, in which genetically engineered super mutants plot to take over the world using an army of giant slugs and high tech aircraft. Or not.

Come to think of it, wasn’t the original Metal Gear 8-bit? I might get to play that!

GSMGS Score

Graphics: 4 (Good) Nice background details and gaudy colours.

Sound FX: 2 (Poor) Not much variety here, the explosions all sound the same.

Music: 2 (Poor) Although charming, it’s not exactly appropriate for the game and gets repetitive quite quickly.

Gameplay: 4 (Good) Entertaining, sometimes innovative and involves some skill.

Story: 2 (Poor) Quite unintelligible really, though it does offer surprises.

Total Score

For Christmas 2015 I was given this “retro games controller”, a mini console with two hundred 8-bit games built in.

Growing up in the Nineties with an Amiga 500, SNES, and access to a friend’s Master System, having two hundred games back then would have seemed unbelievable (in the days before Steam’s catalogue of instantly accessible titles), especially without requiring a floppy disc or cartridge for each one.

Now we have access to millions of games, TV shows and films on demand this kind of gift could easily be dipped into and then tossed into a cupboard without further thought, so I decided why not try to give each of these 200 games a fair chance? I could try out each one and review it based on some kind of scoring system.

I came up with a detailed and methodical system for the reviews which I've given the handy acronym GSMGS (it practically rolls off the tongue). For each game I’ll consider the following features:

Graphics

Sound FX

Music

Gameplay

Story

Each feature will be given a score out of five:

Abysmal

Poor

Average

Very Good

Outstanding

I’ll then give it a final score based on the total number of points divided by five. That way I can compile a top ten or top twenty list, and perhaps even add it to the blog as some kind of fancy widget that appears on every page (I’m new to this).