Bart Vs. The Space Mutants on NES

This was one of my favorite games growing up. I loved The Simpsons and who could forget The Simpsons arcade game? I used to watch this game get played a lot. I was never very good at it, but I still enjoy it. The concept of the game is pretty easy. Each stage has a different goal. The first stage is to paint or cover everything that is purple to red.

You can do random things like this part where you drop towels over some purple items or..

Spray paint a cop. For the most part you just spray stationary items like trashcans or birdbaths or whatnot. Throughout the levels you can pick up Krusty heads that are extra lives and coins which you can use to buy stuff. I have never found any other reason to use these coins other than in the first level, but I believe if you collect enough you can get extra lives as well. You can also get your family to help you out by jumping on top of the humans that have aliens on top of their head..

And picking up your "proof" to get your family to help. That's what the manual says! I just assumed it was letters to activate your family member to help. The photo above is part of the second stage. The second stage you go around collecting hats. You find them lying around or you can jump to get them off of other characters heads. Here's one of the hardest parts of this level..

Jumping across the stupid cement! Also, you have to watch for those stupid lollipops and make sure they are vertical or else you fall down. And that's instant death. This is normally what takes a bunch of my lives and wasn't able to pass this stage. But I finally passed this stage!

I had to take a picture as fast as I could cause I didn't know how far I would get! This third stage is a carnival and you have to collect balloons. I swear I thought you could play carnival games too, but I couldn't figure out how to do it and I didn't get too far anyway to be able to figure it out. There's these clowns that jump around and their pattern is irregular so I lost my lives on that. You can get a slingshot in this stage but I didn't get it in the short amount of time I played this stage.

The biggest problem with this game is the controls. In order for you to run you have to jump first, then hold down the button to run. Also, you can do some sort of super jump by hitting A and B at the same time. If you have spray paint (or probably any other weapon equipped) you use a little bit of it. Quite weird. Also, you slide around when you try to stop. This makes jumping parts very hard to control.

Anyway, there are 5 or 6 stages, so I have a long way to go before I beat this game...

Dino City for SNES

Dino City for the SNES. I remember playing this game as a kid with my Brother and it really used to make us mad. I don't remember getting very far before turning of the game. Now that I'm older, I can actually get to the last stage before the final boss.

The silly plot of this game is this: Timmy and his friend (or sister, it doesn't really explain who she is or even her name) want to watch a movie on a big TV. So you go down to Timmy's father's lab and try to watch it on a big screen TV, but it ends up sucking you into this land inside the TV. You need to get through all six stages (each stage has 3 levels and a boss stage) to defeat Rockey's gang so that you can get some part to repair the machine to return you back to home.

There are two different dinosaur characters to play as, but I always pick Tops because the other one does this retarded punch, but Tops shoots arrows or spears or whatever it may be. You can also get your little character off the back of the dinosaur to freeze enemies.

You get three hits before you bite the dust. You can collect hearts to fill up your contaners that are pretty easy to come across throughout most of the stages. It is quite easy to earn a lot of lives in this game as well. There are eggs you collect throughout each level and also some bonus stages. After you collect 50 eggs you get an extra life. There are also 1-up's scattered throughout as well. The life counter maxes out a 9 lives, but you can continue to earn them. Your counter will stay at 9 until you actually get less than 9 lives.

In order to get to the bonus stages, you need to go through at least two "orange" doors. When you get to the end of a stage, it will normally lead you to two different doors: a "yellow" door and an "orange" door. The orange door is usually harder to get to, hence why they lead you to the bonus stages.

It also seems easy to "cheat" on the bonus stages. I don't know if it's really cheating or not, but since you can jump off the dinosaur you can cover more ground and get more stuff. It's certainly easier than trying to jump all around.

A lot of the levels repeat in style and most of them are not too hard. There are two different levels that give me trouble. One type of stage is when you're riding on a rollercoaster. Another is when you're riding on this giant wheel. The level of difficulty isn't necessarily why they are hard, but there is serious slowdown in these stages and it makes it hard to control.

Once you complete a stage, you get a silly screen that has your two characters marching along the bottom, along with your score (that you only see on this stage complete screen) and a password. The password is pretty cool. It saves how many lives you have no matter if you turn the system off and enter it later. So I have a password for the start of Stage 5 with 9 lives! (NOTE: That is not what the password below is).

All in all, this game is a lot of fun and not too challenging. Stage 6 gets really hard really fast, but other than that the rest of the game is pretty easy. I was trying to record gameplay for this post, but I didn't have any luck getting a clear recording, so I'll save it for a future post. Be sure to check out this game if you get a chance.

New addition to the console family

That's right, I took another step out of retro gaming. But I didn't purchase this console, it was given to me. It's an 80gig system that is not backwards compatible. I currently have two games for it: SingStar (which I don't have any mics to play it with) and LittleBigPlanet. I put in LittleBigPlanet knowing that it was going to take awhile to install to the system, but it took an hour to! I had to download an update, then install game data to the system! Dang.. With my NES, all I have to do is put in the game and it plays. Even with my Wii, all the game has to do is load for a little bit! I also decided to download the free rental for Godzilla 2000 that was on the PlayStation Store and that stupid thing took 2 hours to download! It's a good thing I wasn't actually waiting to watch it.

All in all, I really don't know how often I'll play this thing. I had borrowed one before from my work and played the Sega Genesis Collection and I loved it! But it kind of defeats the purpose of getting this "new age" system only to play Genesis games on it. I can just use my Genesis!

Eventually I'll get more games or download some from the PlayStation Store, but for now I'm saving my monies for other, more exciting things! Yaaay!

Goodies

Three games real low cheap! All three of them were pretty dirty, but I cleaned them up real nice. They are all in pretty decent shape for games from a thrift store. Heavy Shreddin' and Tecmo Baseball both have a little gash at the top of the label, but otherwise they are all fine.

Tecmo Baseball reminds me a lot of RBI Baseball. When you're doing the batting at pitching, you see full sized (yet goofy) looking characters, but once you get to the full view of the field, the little guys look like RBI guys. The batting is pretty awkward, but it's a fun game. I'd suggest looking it up.

Heavy Shreddin' reminds me of Slalom. The controls are weird and I didn't make it too far. It's hard to tell what you can and can't touch, and when you get to areas where you need to avoid people they seem to get in your way on purpose. Booo. The graphics are nothing special. A lot of white.

I had no idea what I was doing really when I played Hoops. You just play basketball, but I don't know how to aim for the stupid basket so I missed every shot. Oh well. One of those games to just say I own it.

Some exciting news though, it seems that I have figured out how to make it so the scan lines aren't so bad with my digital camera. Unfortunately the battery is dead at the moment, but once I get it nice and charged I will try to record some gameplay for my next post. Whoo hoo!