zmweasel
06-02-2004, 09:23 AM
In another forum thread, Jaysen stated:
And let's not forget Mr. Jamie Starr! That guy has real talent! I had a couple of non-journalist friends compare Starr's and Meston's reviews and Starr's won, hands down, every time. It was shocking. Shocking! A 15-year veteran getting a beat-down from a punk like Jamie Starr! Maybe we will see this develop into a friendly writing rivalry?
I'm curious to see if DP's forum-folk agree with Jamie's--er, Jaysen's friends, so I've started this poll. If you vote, please go into explicit detail about what you did and didn't like about each review. Be brutal. Kindness does me no good. Point out things like the fact that "Jamie" doesn't know how to spell his own first name, or that I'm so out of touch with current pop culture that I used Marlon Brando as a fat-guy reference.
"Jamie Starr's" write-up of Stunt Race FX:
Damn, these graphics are unbelievable! It's freaking 3D racing on my Super Nintendo! Sure, my PC can do it, but my Super Nintendo?
Those words were uttered by me almost ten years ago today as I sat down with Stunt Race FX for the first time. Imagine my anxiousness as I fired it up again in 2004, ready to relive past glories and bask in the brilliance of the prodigious FX chip. I put the cart into my royal purple and gray machine, pushed the dimpled power switchg up, jacked right into my first race...and immediately powered the almighty SNES down. That's right, I turned the sucker off. Why? You tell me. Why don't you go and play this drivel again? That's right, I called it drivel.
Before you guys (and gals) get all bent out of shape and start sending me hate haim like you did for my Gaiares review (classic, my ass), I implore you...please go play this game again. I can assure you that it is not what you remember it to be. I'll bet you remember it just the way I did in those opening sentences above. You're probably salivating over the thought of pulling this cart of storage or adding it to your collection via a purchase through ebay, or for you cheap bastards, downloading it for emulation (please not that Mr. Starr's comments do not necessarily reflect those of Manci Games Magazine's editorial staff - ed.). You're probably thinking, "Aw geez, old Jaime here doesn't know what he's talking about. That game was great!" To which I respond: Just go play it again!
Look, the game does have its redeeming qualities. The music is the stuff of legend. I was bouncing in my seat through the whole thing (and not just because of the positioning of the pillow I was sitting on). The actual gameplay and physics are also pretty good, and I would dare say, way above average. But the frame-rate... Good lord... I've seen pre-schoolers draw those crappy crayon pictures faster than this game updates the screen. The game can't be chugging along any faster than 10 to 15 frames per second.
Here's the problem: What good is great physics and gameplay if you can't even tell what your button press did until a split second after you press it? I felt like I was playing an online Dreamcast game.
For those of you unfamiliar with Stunt Race FX, here's what type of game it is: a racing game. Pretty simple, eh? It's just your standard polygonal racing fare, but with lots of cool jumps thrown in for good measure. There is also a stunt-mode included, but it is even less enjoyable to play than the main racing game.
I've played many-a-retro game lately, and I've enjoyed a lot of them. So, I know its possible to play an older game and still get enjoyment out of it. If you look at the little tagline below "RetroReview" at the top of this page, you'll notice that it says, "Old Games. New Perspectives." And therein lies the problem with Stunt Race. The game was fun 10 years ago, but now I just find myself wanting to switch off this stuttering, headache inducing, seizure causing piece of silicon as fast as I can.
Some might argue that you just can't compare a racer of yesteryear to the standards of today. Oh yeah? Then why do I still play the hell out of R.C. Pro Am, which came out about six years before Stunt Race? Because R.C. Pro Am still serves up the fun-factor, even when played under new perspectives.
Zach Meston's write-up of It Came From the Desert:
Inspired by the 1954 B-movie Them!, in which nuclear-supersized ants gorge upon the unsuspecting residents of a Nevada community like Marlon Brando wolfing down a box of cherry bonbons, It Came From the Desert is an hour's worth of cheesy full-motion video clips glued together by a trio of poorly executed mini-games. It's arguably the worst "interactive movie" for the TG-CD, from the developer that pioneered the heinous genre.
Desert casts the player as Buzz Lincoln, a rebellious high-school senior in the sleepy desert burg of Lovelock. Rebellious by '50s standards, anyway, which means he wears a leather jacket and drives a motorcycle. In any case, when a pickup truck spills its cargo of radioactive waste at the outskirts of town, the local ant colony grows to unusual size, develops a collective super-intelligence, and starts recruiting the eccentric citizens of Lovelock into the nefarious "Antmind" with false promises of stock options and a great dental plan.
As events unfold in eight days of game time--which will soon seem like eight days of real time, given the endless CD-ROM access--you're given the task of stopping the Antmind before it constructs and detonates an H-bomb to enable its quest for world...DOMINATION!! Every morning, afternoon, and evening, you pick a Lovelock location from a list, watch a triumphantly overacted video clip, and play one of the aforementioned mini-games. It doesn't matter how you do at the mini-games, however; all you gotta do is kill the ant queen on the seventh or eighth day for the good ending, or let her live for the bad ending.
In 1992, Desert's digitized video was a very impressive technical feat; in 2004, there ain't nothin' impressive about quarter-screen, four-color, 15-fps video clips accompanied by humming, heavily compressed sound. Even if you manage to choke down the primitive FMV, you'll gag on the pixel-chewing performances of the dinner-theater rejects who make up the cast. Not that the dialogue would give Tarantino or Mamet any sleepless nights, but coming from the mouths of an acting troupe that was apparently competing to see who could go the farthest over the top, it's never anything but awful.
The first of the mini-games is an overhead-view sequence in which you lob grenades and dynamite at the big ol' bugs and their gaping antholes. The action screeches to a near-halt when more than a few ants are on-screen, the controls make it very difficult to execute your limited number of smart-bomb attacks (not that you ever need to), and the gameplay never gets more challenging or interesting.
The mini-game in which you dash through mine tunnels while blasting ants and zombies is plagued with problems. The controls are sluggish, the grenades are useless (instead of throwing them at the rapidly moving ants, your character slowly places them on the ground at his feet!), the wire-fu backflip is useless, and the action is squeezed into the middle third of the screen. This is unquestionably the worst segment of the three.
The third mini-game is a disturbing sequence in which you move a targeting reticule around the screen and shoot a certain number of scurrying ants before they skeletonize a prone victim. This mini-game becomes more challenging as the game progresses, and it's the only one with a clearly defined goal, making it by far the most entertaining.
The actress who plays Buzz's would-be love interest is pleasantly restrained (and very cute), and the ability to save at any time is a welcome option, but one monochromatic hot chick and one ahead-of-its-time feature isn't enough to distract from the fact that It Came From the Desert is, first and foremost, a really bad semi-movie.
And let's not forget Mr. Jamie Starr! That guy has real talent! I had a couple of non-journalist friends compare Starr's and Meston's reviews and Starr's won, hands down, every time. It was shocking. Shocking! A 15-year veteran getting a beat-down from a punk like Jamie Starr! Maybe we will see this develop into a friendly writing rivalry?
I'm curious to see if DP's forum-folk agree with Jamie's--er, Jaysen's friends, so I've started this poll. If you vote, please go into explicit detail about what you did and didn't like about each review. Be brutal. Kindness does me no good. Point out things like the fact that "Jamie" doesn't know how to spell his own first name, or that I'm so out of touch with current pop culture that I used Marlon Brando as a fat-guy reference.
"Jamie Starr's" write-up of Stunt Race FX:
Damn, these graphics are unbelievable! It's freaking 3D racing on my Super Nintendo! Sure, my PC can do it, but my Super Nintendo?
Those words were uttered by me almost ten years ago today as I sat down with Stunt Race FX for the first time. Imagine my anxiousness as I fired it up again in 2004, ready to relive past glories and bask in the brilliance of the prodigious FX chip. I put the cart into my royal purple and gray machine, pushed the dimpled power switchg up, jacked right into my first race...and immediately powered the almighty SNES down. That's right, I turned the sucker off. Why? You tell me. Why don't you go and play this drivel again? That's right, I called it drivel.
Before you guys (and gals) get all bent out of shape and start sending me hate haim like you did for my Gaiares review (classic, my ass), I implore you...please go play this game again. I can assure you that it is not what you remember it to be. I'll bet you remember it just the way I did in those opening sentences above. You're probably salivating over the thought of pulling this cart of storage or adding it to your collection via a purchase through ebay, or for you cheap bastards, downloading it for emulation (please not that Mr. Starr's comments do not necessarily reflect those of Manci Games Magazine's editorial staff - ed.). You're probably thinking, "Aw geez, old Jaime here doesn't know what he's talking about. That game was great!" To which I respond: Just go play it again!
Look, the game does have its redeeming qualities. The music is the stuff of legend. I was bouncing in my seat through the whole thing (and not just because of the positioning of the pillow I was sitting on). The actual gameplay and physics are also pretty good, and I would dare say, way above average. But the frame-rate... Good lord... I've seen pre-schoolers draw those crappy crayon pictures faster than this game updates the screen. The game can't be chugging along any faster than 10 to 15 frames per second.
Here's the problem: What good is great physics and gameplay if you can't even tell what your button press did until a split second after you press it? I felt like I was playing an online Dreamcast game.
For those of you unfamiliar with Stunt Race FX, here's what type of game it is: a racing game. Pretty simple, eh? It's just your standard polygonal racing fare, but with lots of cool jumps thrown in for good measure. There is also a stunt-mode included, but it is even less enjoyable to play than the main racing game.
I've played many-a-retro game lately, and I've enjoyed a lot of them. So, I know its possible to play an older game and still get enjoyment out of it. If you look at the little tagline below "RetroReview" at the top of this page, you'll notice that it says, "Old Games. New Perspectives." And therein lies the problem with Stunt Race. The game was fun 10 years ago, but now I just find myself wanting to switch off this stuttering, headache inducing, seizure causing piece of silicon as fast as I can.
Some might argue that you just can't compare a racer of yesteryear to the standards of today. Oh yeah? Then why do I still play the hell out of R.C. Pro Am, which came out about six years before Stunt Race? Because R.C. Pro Am still serves up the fun-factor, even when played under new perspectives.
Zach Meston's write-up of It Came From the Desert:
Inspired by the 1954 B-movie Them!, in which nuclear-supersized ants gorge upon the unsuspecting residents of a Nevada community like Marlon Brando wolfing down a box of cherry bonbons, It Came From the Desert is an hour's worth of cheesy full-motion video clips glued together by a trio of poorly executed mini-games. It's arguably the worst "interactive movie" for the TG-CD, from the developer that pioneered the heinous genre.
Desert casts the player as Buzz Lincoln, a rebellious high-school senior in the sleepy desert burg of Lovelock. Rebellious by '50s standards, anyway, which means he wears a leather jacket and drives a motorcycle. In any case, when a pickup truck spills its cargo of radioactive waste at the outskirts of town, the local ant colony grows to unusual size, develops a collective super-intelligence, and starts recruiting the eccentric citizens of Lovelock into the nefarious "Antmind" with false promises of stock options and a great dental plan.
As events unfold in eight days of game time--which will soon seem like eight days of real time, given the endless CD-ROM access--you're given the task of stopping the Antmind before it constructs and detonates an H-bomb to enable its quest for world...DOMINATION!! Every morning, afternoon, and evening, you pick a Lovelock location from a list, watch a triumphantly overacted video clip, and play one of the aforementioned mini-games. It doesn't matter how you do at the mini-games, however; all you gotta do is kill the ant queen on the seventh or eighth day for the good ending, or let her live for the bad ending.
In 1992, Desert's digitized video was a very impressive technical feat; in 2004, there ain't nothin' impressive about quarter-screen, four-color, 15-fps video clips accompanied by humming, heavily compressed sound. Even if you manage to choke down the primitive FMV, you'll gag on the pixel-chewing performances of the dinner-theater rejects who make up the cast. Not that the dialogue would give Tarantino or Mamet any sleepless nights, but coming from the mouths of an acting troupe that was apparently competing to see who could go the farthest over the top, it's never anything but awful.
The first of the mini-games is an overhead-view sequence in which you lob grenades and dynamite at the big ol' bugs and their gaping antholes. The action screeches to a near-halt when more than a few ants are on-screen, the controls make it very difficult to execute your limited number of smart-bomb attacks (not that you ever need to), and the gameplay never gets more challenging or interesting.
The mini-game in which you dash through mine tunnels while blasting ants and zombies is plagued with problems. The controls are sluggish, the grenades are useless (instead of throwing them at the rapidly moving ants, your character slowly places them on the ground at his feet!), the wire-fu backflip is useless, and the action is squeezed into the middle third of the screen. This is unquestionably the worst segment of the three.
The third mini-game is a disturbing sequence in which you move a targeting reticule around the screen and shoot a certain number of scurrying ants before they skeletonize a prone victim. This mini-game becomes more challenging as the game progresses, and it's the only one with a clearly defined goal, making it by far the most entertaining.
The actress who plays Buzz's would-be love interest is pleasantly restrained (and very cute), and the ability to save at any time is a welcome option, but one monochromatic hot chick and one ahead-of-its-time feature isn't enough to distract from the fact that It Came From the Desert is, first and foremost, a really bad semi-movie.