Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

In the spirit of the season, with the release of the now-annual Star Wars film upon us, it is high time we think about some of the superlative video games from the movie franchise that marks the greatest marketing force in the history of commercialism. Perhaps the most acerbically underrated of the Star Wars games is Shadows of the Empire for the N64, long dismissed by critics as mediocre or even one of the worst Star Wars games when it is actually one of the best.

Dash Rendar

Shadows of the Empire puts the gamer in the boots of Dash Rendar, a rugged, stubble-chinned Star Wars version of Roland of Gilead (of Dark Tower fame), something of an interplanetary Clint Eastwood. His mission is to rescue Princess Leia from Prince Xizor, the overlord of what is basically an alien mafia. Rendar's quest begins at the battle of Hoth, in which he takes control of a Snowspeeder and helps fell AT-ATs with his skillful deployment of tow cables. The opening level's overall umwelt is nothing short of marvelous, particularly in terms of sound: from the squalling joints of the pachyderm-esque AT-STs to the mechanized chittering of the imperial drones (which has always sounded to this reviewer like they're muttering "Marilyn seems demure" over and over), the audio is spot-on. This is Hoth; you are in The Empire Strikes Back. The game is by no means just a spacecraft simulator; rather, it is a bounteous grab-bag of game types. For the subsequent stages of the Hoth mission, Shadows of the Empire becomes a third-person shooter—though the player has the option to go first-person, which your correspondent finds far more eminently playable and immersive compared to its over-the-shoulder alternative. After that, Rendar gets behind his ship’s gun turret to take out some TIE Fighters, turning the game into a space shooter—and an absorbing one at that. Then the game becomes an outright platformer when Rendar traverses speeding railcars on Ord Mantell, a level that is the apotheosis of the George Lucas experience, all narrowing paths and hair's breadth escapes. Shadows of the Empire even has racing elements, as the unwieldy, breakneck swoop-bike pursuit on Mos Eisley is essentially a chase to the finish.

All of these vastly diverse gameplay components are handled very competently. Some are almost too competent, and in this way, Shadows of the Empire is a victim of its own outstanding features. So good is the Hoth level, in fact, that some have complained the rest of the game pales in comparison. This had repercussions, as later Star Wars games for Nintendo systems, namely the stellar Rogue Squadron series, focused exclusively on this spacecraft-simulator aspect. Ultimately, Shadows of the Empire leans fairly heavily on the third/first-person running and gunning, and this is, admittedly, not quite as captivating as what happens in the air over Hoth. This is precisely the criticism levied by Allgame's Scott Alan Marriott. In a quote this reviewer admits was lifted directly from Wikipedia, Marriott calls the on-foot levels “rather boring, probably due to the less involving third-person perspective.” In response to Mr. Marriot and anyone else with this particular critique, I would suggest they’re playing Shadows of the Empire the wrong way. Switch to first-person. It is real dread you’ll feel when you swing around to run from the angered Wampas’ ponderous pursuit.

This sort of immersion is the principal strength of Shadows of the Empire. The sound-effects, in concert with John Williams' score, make for a thoroughly cinematic feel, as do the graphics which, while somewhat blocky, still benefit from stirring shading effects and gritty, textured backdrops. When seen and heard in first-person, this all contributes to a far more convincing experience of the Star Wars umwelt than comparable games of the time, such as the PlayStation FPS offering Star Wars: Dark Forces, which feels more like the original Doom or Powerslave than it does a true Star Wars game. And that, your correspondent submits to you, dear reader, is what Star Wars is: a series of familiar sounds and images and feelings that are all at once compelling and comforting. Shadows of the Empire has all these crucial evocations, and not only lets you participate within them, but it lets you do so in so many different ways (shooting, flying, racing, and so forth). How, then, can we deny Shadows of the Empire is one of the best Star Wars video games? There are far too many kinds of quality within it to write it off.

NHL Hockey

The 1977 film Slap Shot is, without the hyperbole often mistaken for wit by millennial writers, a period piece of extraordinary genius. Over the course of the late sixties and seventies, with the NHL's expansion from six to twenty-one teams alongside the formation of the rival World Hockey Association, the employment opportunities for minor league hockey players substantially burgeoned. The corollary, however, was that the talent level of "major league" hockey dropped considerably. Skill and finesse were no longer the definitive capacities of an effective hockey player. By the mid-seventies players could participate in the bigs by virtue of sheer physical presence alone. The Philadelphia Flyers are a case in point. Their lineup consisted almost entirely of goons, and they became the first of the expansion teams to win the Stanley Cup, doing so largely on the grounds of intimidation, which earned them their "Broad Street Bullies" nickname with good cause. Faced with so many new and unusual hockey markets, the increase in fighting, stick-swinging and bench-clearing brawls served another crucial purpose: it kept people from places like Birmingham, Alabama and Oakland, California coming to the rinks, even if rudimentary skills like skating and passing were lacking. Slap Shot, then, impeccably captured hockey of its time—a brutally violent roller-derby on ice, its characters as fit for a professional wrestling ring as they were for a rink.

Few if any video games have accurately simulated hockey’s Crimson Age, and perhaps never will (though the 2K series has come close). That said, if you'd like to partake in something comparable to the perfect entertainment that is Slap Shot, then the original NHL Hockey by Electronic Arts is your ticket. To be certain, NHL Hockey’s sequel NHL 94 is the best game in the decades-old series due to its breezy gameplay and full license, but it lacks one crucial element that its predecessor has in spades: full-bore fistic fracases. While NHL 94 took the moral high ground and eliminated fighting entirely (by diktat of the NHL itself), the primordial game in the series was not nearly as virtuous, placing no limit upon fisticuffs. Occasionally, these fights break out during the course of gameplay, but the real goonery happens after the whistle. Body-check a few members of the opposition when play is stopped, and eventually one of them will drop the gloves. In due time, the penalty boxes will look like player's benches. NHL Hockey is, unfortunately, not up to the standard of NHL 94 in terms of pace, nor does it contain the all-important one-time shot, but again, like a hockey fan in Birmingham, Alabama, you're not at the rink for the ice capades. You're there to go to war.

Though the endless stream of fights may temporarily stave our bloodlust, NHL Hockey still leaves us wanting more. With all these post-whistle cheap shots, why aren't other players skating in to save their fallen line-mates? Why aren't the designated fighters spilling off the bench? What your correspondent really wants to know is: where are line-brawls? Where are the bench-clearing brouhahas? The 16-bit NHL Hockey obviously lacked the technology to simulate such multi-man free-for-alls, and certainly the National Hockey League would never approve of such gratuitous violence—at least not involving more than two players. But nowadays, we have systems capable of putting 12 or even 40 players on the ice. Why can't an intrepid little developer make a game that is one part non-licensed 70's hockey simulation, another part real-time strategy? When brawls break out, the controlling player could then set match-ups between various forwards, defensemen and goalies, methodically taking out the other team's marquee players en route to gooning their way to victory. And it doesn't even have to be unlicensed: get the Slap Shot rights from Universal Pictures and let the Charlestown Chiefs and Syracuse Bulldogs settle things once and for all, without (spoiler alert!) having to rely on a male striptease as the deciding factor.

Ken Griffey Jr.'s Slugfest

Do you want to see adult film legend Ron Jeremy play major league baseball? If your answer to this question is yes—and it should be—then picking up a copy of Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest is imperative. The second N64 offering in Nintendo’s cartoonish Griffey-backed baseball series contains audio clips of the names of virtually all MLBPA players from the late 90s, and announces them over the in-game public address system as they make their way out to the plate or the mound. The game also features a moderately robust create-a-player mode, and any creation with the first and/or last name of an active player will be likewise announced before batting or pitching. Thanks to Ron Gant and Jeremy Giambi,

the owner of Slugfest has the privilege of hearing porn’s most famous name ring out in any major league ballpark. Set your create-a-character’s weight at a Rubenesque 270, height at 5'8, give him a black Mario-worthy moustache and voila!—the Hardest (Working) Man in Show Business is now a major leaguer. Indeed, the irrepressible Hollywood D-Lister's Slugfest avatar bears Nintendo’s adorable spokes-plumber an odd resemblance, which has already been appreciated to great effect by the timeless adult-oriented feature Super Hornio Bros., starring Jeremy in the lead role of Hornio Hornio. What role will Ron Jeremy play on your team? His skills at third base are amply documented, at least figuratively speaking. Jeremy’s potential presence, however, is really the only enduring charm of Slugfest. True to the Griffey series’ abiding arcade sensibilities, Slugfest is built around cursor-based batting, the done-to-death darling of late-90’s baseball videogame developers. This system has not aged particularly well, as it basically reduces hitting to a mini-game. The options permit you to switch the batting style to “classic”, which relies on timing and general bat position in the style of earlier and later baseball classics such as Hardball and MVP 2004 but be prepared for low-scoring, pitching-dominated affairs where the few runs plated result from lucky-strike homeruns. Still, Slugfest’s peccadilloes are worth suffering to see Ron Jeremy go deep in Mets’ pinstripes. And for once, mercifully, he keeps his pants on while doing so.

Punch-Out!!

In any iteration, Punch-Out!! is pure prizefighting genius, a verdict that should come as no surprise to even the most casual gamer. Considering it was first released in 1987, the cinematic feel of its presentation is staggering. Drawing on Rocky-esque tropes—most notably the training cut-scene with a cityscape in the background, not Philadelphia but even better Manhattan, complete with the Statue of Liberty—Punch-Out!! evokes a fundamentally American aesthetic and narrative arc.

Apart from the presentation, Punch-Out!! remains noteworthy on account of its characters. While Little Mac, the Caucasian-American protagonist under the player's control, is underwhelming and diminutive, virtually faceless with his back to the player for most of the game, the antagonists he faces are the stuff of legend. What is most fascinating about the pixelated pugilists is that they are, from the perspective of the American consumer, almost entirely composed of foreigners, and each of these internationally-flavored opponents is depicted in an aggressively stereotypical fashion. There is, for example, a fairly obvious Orientalism informing the look and comportment of several characters, such as Piston Hondo, a Japanese fighter complete with logographic headband and easily agitated eyebrows above his epicanthic gaze. The Orientalism is even more egregious in the case of Great Tiger, a turbaned Sikh who is, quite impressively, capable of a fakir-like flickering in and out of visibility whilst floating about the ring. Curiously enough, the game was developed by an all-Japanese crew headed by Nintendo standout Genyo Takeda, suggesting that some of the East Asian stereotypes may have been self-deprecating in-jokes.

The feckless French stereotype (right)

But the caricatures go beyond Orientalism, for all cultures portrayed in Punch-Out!! are painted in gaudy, monochromatic tones. Don Flamenco is a Spanish romantic who dances pompously with a rose-stem between his teeth; far more flair than substance, he mounts minimal offense, making for an easy knock out. The Frenchman Glass Joe is even more hapless, victim of perhaps the archest stereotyping: gutless and ineffectual, he goes down easiest of any character. These stereotypes are not just aesthetical, but are literally coded right into the fabric of the gameplay. Punch-Out!!'s characters are as notorious among NES enthusiasts for their logic patterns as they are for their looks and personalities. Thus, it is unanimously known that corpulent Pacific Islander King Hippo will jab mercilessly before inevitably jumping in the air and unhinging his massive craw, opening himself up to a fistic assault which will cause him to drop his drawers and expose his vulnerable spheroid gut for further damage. Moreover, everyone knows that when the gem in the middle of Great Tiger's turban begins to sparkle, it’s due time to block his attacks. Punch-Out!! essentially reduces the cultural Other to a sort of automaton, limited to a narrow range of behaviors and gestures, and altogether incapable of change. By contrast, Little Mac has the ability to move left and right, and punch in any sequence the player deems fitting. The American subject(ivity), then, fully realized in the player/consumer holding the controller, is possessed with expansive agency relative to the Other. To be American is to fully actualize this agency, and most markedly so through sport—if not the physical act itself, then the spectation thereof or the participation in spectation via video game simulation. In any event, the Other is to be conquered en route to glory.

Punch-Out!! proffers further sociopolitical commentary vis-à-vis the most obvious Other of its era. Given that the Berlin wall was edging towards a fall and the Cold War was approaching absolute zero during the development of Mike Tyson's Punch Out!! (the game’s original North American home release in 1987), a character like Soda Popinski can be read in terms of the contemporaneous geopolitics. The pinkish hue of his skin signifies quite plainly his socialist background—that is, the "pinko commie". Moreover, Popinski minces his well-muscled frame around the ring in a skimpy Speedo, definitely not standard boxing attire, indexing a certain degree of effeminacy for the political Other. Correspondingly, he is given to dancing mid-match. More damningly, Popinski is characterized by an obvious fixation for quaffing the soda pop for which he is named, an act of obsessive consumption that would seem to forsake his inborn Marxist orientation. Thus, the hypocrisy of Popinski's collectivist, Communist values and the individual restraint they would ideally embody is conveyed via his irrepressible pattern of consumption centering upon a beverage commercially popularized in America. This makes for a more rigorous (and less juvenile) critique of Russo-Soviet culture than the character's original conceptualization earlier on in the game’s development—that is, "Vodka Drunkenski", a moniker that was eventually modified when it was adjudged potentially offensive, for whatever reason.

Punch-Out!!'s American adversaries do not appear until the end of the game, and they provide the toughest competition. They also have the least personality, amounting to little more than generic strong men who are hyper-competent in the sweet science. The message seems to be clear: the world is the rest, but America is the best; we're not dancing around anymore. Evidently, the Japanese programmers were enamored of America. Oddly enough, the incumbent champ Super Macho Man fights in the same pattern as Popinski, perhaps conjecturing the dialectal ideological mirror that Americans and Soviets, Capitalists and Communists, provided for one another. This may be a subtle critique from the Japanese developers, though it is more likely lazy programming. The final boss in 1990's Punch-Out!! is another American, Mr. Dream by name, and he has the least character of all, square-headed and box-cut with an inexorable winning smile. This is America, an exceptional force cutting through the layers of dross that constitute all the other ethnicities of the world and their cultural overlays, and giving you, in the end, pure sinew with a grin.

As its title indicates, the original home version of Punch-Out!! featured Mike Tyson until Nintendo's license to use the likeness of the Baddest Man on the Planet expired. Mr. Dream, then, was a re-skinning of Tyson for the 1990 re-release of the game. This proved to be a fortuitous move, as family-friendly Nintendo certainly wouldn't want anything to do with the embattled Iron Mike who would soon after be convicted of rape charges. Mr. Dream, then, can be interpreted as a white-bread gentrification or domestication of Mike Tyson; that is, a more palatable—and entirely fictional—realization of the American dream. Perhaps behind the unfaltering smile, though, there still lurks the predatory animal heart of America, moving in Mike Tyson’s predetermined pattern.

In sum, Punch-Out!! is nothing short of timeless, in much the same way Orientalists presumed the colonial Other to be, what with their inherent ahistorical torpor. This sense of civilizational stagnancy is readily visible in the game’s non-American characters, who collectively evidence a particular lack of imagination—or rather a commitment to a particular constellation of troublesome cross-cultural imaginings—on the part of the programmers. While Punch-Out!! is undeniably problematic politically speaking, its gameplay holds up even today, and for that reason, among others, the odious stereotypes it perpetuates will live on in the annals of Boxiana and beyond.

Superman 64

The passionate retro gamer inevitably seeks out mint condition copies of his or her favorite games. So too will he or she buy mint condition copies of the best games ever. Likely, there will be overlap between these two categories of “best” and “favorite”. But what about the games that aren't so good? What about the games that are classically awful? Not unlike great games, these too stand as singular monoliths in video game history, the most captivating curios of crap. To own the worst game ever should also be an abiding goal of the truly expansive collector. That game, I submit to you, is Superman 64.

Released by Titus in 1999, Superman 64 is indeed superlative, but only in the worst sense of the term. The gameplay is structured around recurrently flying the Last Son of Krypton through decagonal rings—according to the game’s “story”, this constitutes a “maze” devised by the ingenious Lex Luthor, though it amounts to little more than aimless busy work for the person holding the controller. Superman 64 persists at making you fly through these rings, all within the confines of a time limit. Graphically, Metropolis is reduced to a series of blocky rectangles representing buildings, the space between them shrouded in a level of fogginess unforgivable even for the N64. Animation is also horrible, and so when Superman takes to the ground, he runs with a stilted, uncanny gait that is neither human nor Kryptonian. Boss battles are cramped and cringe-inducing, allowing low-level villains to repeatedly hand Superman his Speedo-clad ass-halves. On top of all this, the game is ubiquitously glitch-riddled—unless of course walking through walls is a power of Superman's with which this reviewer is not familiar.

Is Superman 64 truly the worst video game ever? There are many solid contenders for that feculent crown, including Friday the 13th (1989), Shaq Fu (1994), and Simpsons Wrestling (2001), all of which are comparably unplayable. But Superman 64 feels like the worst because it stars Superman. Superman is supposed to be the pinnacle of superheroes, with insuperable speed, power, strength and precision. Playing as the Man of Steel should be empowering. Seeing him veer helplessly through the block-sundered fog is anything but. To witness Superman falter due to atrocious controls and inane game design is not only frustrating as per any other bad game, but it actually becomes a bit heartbreaking. In making the Man of Tomorrow unwieldy and rudderless, Superman 64 inverts the very nature of the hero it attempts to actualize. Where once there seemed to be hope for humanity, now there is only disappointment and dissatisfaction. Superman 64 is no less than a violent disruption of the human spirit and all its constructive potentialities.

Is Superman 64 worth playing once you buy it? Most certainly not, at least not for more than one brief, worst-fears-affirming session. Play too long, and you risk destroying whatever ironic value the game possesses. Bad video games are, after all, not like bad movies. While a terrible film can still be entertaining—and more than a few Superman-related movies come to mind—video games require interaction, and in that sense playing a bad game is like being forced to play a part in a bad movie. Can you imagine having to direct 2016’s Batman vs. Superman? Bad video games make you complicit in their wretchedness. So with Superman 64, try flying through the rings, give up, and then permanently encase the cartridge in its box, keeping it out of reach but not out of sight such that it may stand as a totem of just how wrong the development of licensed games can go. And if you really want to be Superman, play Injustice or Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.

Friday the 13th: The Game

If you are like me, you spent the Saturday nights of your youth in your parents’ basement watching Friday the 13th movies, adoringly beholding Jason as he stalked sexually active teens, the kind of people who you could hear partying two houses down the block. To cancel the whoops and squalls of the partygoers, you would turn up the volume and whisper along with that disembodied voice of Jason’s mother as it alternated between heavily aspirated velar and nasal syllables that echoed chillingly in the surround-sound. You wanted to be at Crystal Lake, watching the carnage from afar, listening to the helpless screams of the beautiful people, because you knew that as long as you weren't having sex, you were safe. And when you went to sleep in your narrow little bed you dreamed, and in the dream you were in those woods and by that waterfront; sometimes you were even behind the hockey mask, stalking mightily towards a sex-sundered cabin.

Now, with Friday the 13th: The Game, you can take that dream vacation to Crystal Lake.* Depending on what personage the randomized character assignment offers you to at the onset of any given multiplayer death-match, you can be any of a number of fawn-eyed camp counselors ranging from lip-glossed jailbait to assertive jocks, or you can even become Jason Himself. Either way, you're finally invited to the party.

Of course, you're not really Jason, as the developers have elected for a third person view rather than the first person. This means you go behind the man-monster without going behind the mask, hulking and hoddering** after nubile teens to net-mind the confines of Camp Crystal Lake. In effect, you're more like Mrs. Voorhees, compelling Jason lovingly from beyond the grave. This is my only conceivable criticism of the game, and it's a minor one.

Some have condemned the randomized role assignment, stating that in a standard eight-player game one only has a 12.5% chance of drawing Jason, only a 12.5% chance of having any fun by way of a murderous rampage. This is immaterial. Let me remind the reader that there is no Jason Voorhees without the lascivious teens; the prey constitutes the predator, so even as a callipygian camp counselor you are playing, in your near-futile scrabble to escape Crystal Lake, a role equally as crucial as that of Jason in creating this cherished horror imaginary. It is the urge to make love that renders death essential. Play Friday the 13th in multiples of eight death-matches at a time and, over the long term, you'll eventually realize by the force of sheer statistics how it truly feels to personify the opposite of life.

If you are like me—and if you have read this far, you probably are—then even a 12.5% chance of being Jason is hope enough for a better Saturday night. In due time, the single-player will be released and it'll be Jason time, all the time. In a few short months, a dream—never a nightmare—will come true in full.

NOTES:

*Technically, Friday the 13th for the Nintendo Entertainment System also gave you the chance to take said dream vacation to Crystal Lake, but the game is not only primitive but also awful. Additionally, you can play as Jason in Mortal Kombat XL, but alas, your only potential victims are characters from the MK universe (and Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, compellingly enough).

**Thanks to Stephen Graham Jones for attesting this verb form. For all of you literate lovers of horror violence—and there are dozens of you—I'd recommend his novel The Last Final Girl, an uncompromisingly post-modern send-up of slasher films.

Clock Tower

In 1996, Human Entertainment released Clock Tower, a point-and-click horror adventure for the Sony PlayStation. While Capcom’s contemporaneous Resident Evil had cornered the market for zombie-movie gaming, Clock Tower aimed toward something of a hybrid between an Italian giallo film and a cheap slasher flick. While the game is slower-paced and more heavily dialogue-based Resident Evil, Clock Tower markedly surpasses Capcom's eventual classic when it comes to the most crucial element of horror cinematography—that is, atmosphere. The whodunit plot takes multiple characters through dank dungeons, spider-webbed libraries, and labyrinthine castle halls, settings which altogether apotheosize foreboding. Moreover, Clock Tower is well-written and well-voiced, at least relative to Resident Evil. This contributes to an immersiveness that produces legitimate chills, none greater than the experience of encountering the villain: a gaunt, cretinous hunchback wielding an exaggeratedly long pair of pruning shears as his trademark weapon.  He goes by the baroque sobriquet of Scissorman.

Scissorman: Worse than Weinstein

Scissorman inherits a ghastly horror legacy, as he represents a bloodcurdling copy of a copy. He was quite obviously inspired by Cropsey, nemesis in the 1981 slasher-cycle feature The Burning, a bandage-faced summer camp caretaker-cum-burn-victim out to avenge his first-degree misadventure by slaughtering camp-goers with gardening shears. While The Burning is a blatant carpetbagger clone of Friday the 13th, it actually outdoes that film as far as lakeside slashing goes, and though it failed at the box-office, it stands as one of the higher-end slice-em-up films. Its canoe scene is legendary in cult cinema circles—when Cropsey springs up, a silhouette of a ragged, carbuncular man with gaping shears raised above him, he reduces Jason Voorhees to a sluggish, silver-medal serial-killer. The Burning marks the feature film debut of George Costanza; or, if you prefer, Jason Alexander. The Burning is also notable for being among the first production credits for acclaimed Hollywood producer and recently-outed serial-groper Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein wrote the original story and thereby had a hand in conceiving the character of Cropsey. Given the violent sexual angst that seems to motivate most slasher villains, one can only imagine what nascent erotic compulsions Weinstein sublimated into Cropsey. Perhaps some of those dark inspirations filtered down to Scissorman. Could it be that when Scissorman chases us in Clock Tower, it is some faint, transmuted vestige of Harvey Weinstein's burning libido that impels the pursuit?

But we've drifted somewhat far afield here. Regardless of the psychic source of the spookiness it delivers, the Clock Tower experience is evidently one for which dedicated horror gamers are willing to shell out exorbitant sums of cash. Indeed, copies in decent condition will fetch over $100 on EBay, and with good cause. Like any good slasher baddie, the game's terror has proven unkillable. And if you can't afford the game, you should at least check out The Burning.

Star Gladiator

The best weapons-based fighting game is Star Gladiator, at least in terms of what the 32-bit era had to offer. Don't be persuaded by Soul Blade just because it’s the precursor to the magisterial Soul Calibur; Capcom's Star Gladiator is the superior game. Star Gladiator Episode I: Final Crusade, as the game’s title somewhat oxymoronically runs in full, has the distinction of being the first polygonal fighting game developed by Capcom in-house, and in 1996, we were fortunate enough to be graced by a PS1 port.

Space Sasquatch vs. Pseudo-Ryu

Set in a far-future fantasy, Star Gladiator Episode I is a one-on-one fighter etched out of what is evidently a larger space opera backdrop. As the title and subtitle would suggest, the game none too subtly emulates the Star Wars aesthetic. This was to be expected, though, as a well-circulated rumor has it that Capcom was originally supposed to be the developer of an official Star Wars versus fighter around the same time in the mid-nineties, until LucasArts eventually decided to attempt such a game themselves. Despite the lack of license, George Lucas’ virtuosic vision of staggering genius heavily shows through in Star Gladiator. Perhaps the most blatant arrogation is the character Gamof, a Wookie-like space-sasquatch who brays like Chewie at the moment of victory and defeat. The game's cover-boy Hayato, who readers may be familiar with given his appearance in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, is the confluence of Ryu and Luke Skywalker. From the former he bears the headband; from the latter he bears a light saber (or "plasma sword", as per the title of the eventual Dreamcast-based sequel). There are a few original characters too, among them Rimgal, the space dinosaur, Zelkin, a space blue jay, and Saturn, a grinning, green-skinned cone-head. Perhaps most puzzling is the proto-boss Gore, a levitating, warbling, macro-brained humanoid with curl-toed shoes who is billed from "Indonesia", for some reason.

This multi-specific cast of characters does 3D battle on a variety of richly drawn (if not polygonal) planets, matching a variety of light-saber surrogates against one another—plasma axes, plasma rapiers, and even plasma yo-yos. A little bit of leisurely button-mashing and you'll have braved the playable characters, setting you up for a showdown against Bilstein, the final boss. He'll use up more than a few of your continues, what with his imposing frame, all-black outfit, and phallic grill-mouthed helmet/mask combo. As you have already figured out, Bilstein is a thinly-veiled stand-in for Darth Vader. Is this degree of appropriation problematic? Not in the least, considering how appallingly executed and clunky the eventual licensed Star Wars fighting game (weapons-based, no less) Masters of Teras Kasi turned out to be. Beating Bilstein actually feels more satisfying than downing Darth Vader in Teras Kasi, not only because the LucasArts game is pure feculence, but also because you have to beat it on “Jedi” (that is, “impossible”) difficulty to unlock Anakin Skywalker gone bad. Don't waste your time with Teras Kasi; buy the unapologetic knock-off instead.

In short, Star Gladiator does Star Wars far better than Teras Kasi ever could. In view of the exemplary gameplay and the barefaced but ultimately workable plagiarism from the greatest marketing force of all time, Star Gladiator is a must-find.

MLB 2003

Fans of baseball and Aristotelian poetics are well acquainted with the story of Barry Bonds. He started as the lean, spry base-stealing son-of-a-big-leaguer, and then evolved rather abruptly into a 240-pound behemoth. In 2001, Bonds destroyed Mark McGwire's three-year old homerun record by slamming 73 round-trippers. Of course, Bonds was by this point on enough Human Growth Hormone to fell a Clydesdale…his singular flaw. Nonetheless, he embodied sheer power in its most hulking, testicularly-shriveled incarnation. Though he sullied the baseball record books (at least from the perspective of a normal man), in 2001 he truly embodied the spirit of America—superlative success by any means necessary, transcending common definitions of humanity and morality in the process.

By contrast, 989’s MLB series, perennially released for the PlayStation, was by no means superlative. The gameplay was solid, though the graphics were humdrum, the animations leaving something to be desired. There were a few years here and there in which MLB was the better PS baseball game, depending on whether EA's streaky Triple Play offering was a hit or a miss. That said, the MLB games did nothing to challenge the supremacy of Acclaim's All-Star Baseball series for N64, which was the more robust simulation in terms of both gameplay and graphics. By the 360/PS3 era, once EA had lost the MLB license to 2K Sports, MLB held out as the dark-horse candidate and would eventually become the de facto go-to baseball game year after year as The Show, a role it never assumed in its 32-bit iterations. That said, every year in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the MLB series could be counted on to turn in a competent simulation of baseball.

You may be asking: Why should any of these early MLB games be noteworthy? What does this have to do with Barry Bonds? The answer to both questions is MLB 2003. The 2003 offering was made for the 2002 season and therefore based on 2001 stats (don't ask), so in this game, Bonds brings to the dish the power of 73 steroid-aided homeruns. There are two swing types in the MLB games, contact and power, and if you use the latter as Bonds in 2003 and put the bat on the ball, you've got about a 50/50 chance of putting said ball in the right-field seats. In short, you can jack dingers like nobody's business. Play a full season, and you'll have Barry in triple digits for homers. It's sheer domination. It never stops feeling good; in fact, the one-man slugfest helps you forget that you're playing a mediocre PS1 baseball game that hasn't aged well.

Don't get your correspondent wrong: Barry Bonds ruined baseball. He's damaged the record books—or at least its homerun record section, marring it with asterisks and footnotes. But in terms of sheer video game power, the processors of MLB 2003 know no steroids and failed drug tests, so Bond’s in-game avatar is clean and pure. What we are left with is the closest simulation of a genuine 73 homerun hitter as we will ever know. If nothing else, Bonds has left a video game legacy.

Perhaps we shouldn't be so harsh on Barry Bonds. Perhaps his legendary (enhanced) performance in the real-life national pastime is as laudable as that in the virtual one as depicted in MLB 2003. After all, isn't it fundamentally American to slash a tear in the fabric of America itself and expect praise for it? In that sense, Barry Bonds is one of the greatest Americans who ever lived.

MVP Baseball 2004

Electronic Arts, while legendary in the sports genre throughout the 1990s on account of perennial favorites like the Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL series, could never quite get baseball right. While it boasted the best in football, basketball and hockey, EA failed to hit the grand slam with a great baseball sim. EA’s first foray into the national pastime was Tony La Russa’s Baseball, a multiplatform series which, like its namesake, was competent but lacked personality. EA tried again with MLBPA Baseball in 1994, but the game proved unengaging in view of its cartoonish graphics, lack of major league teams, and blustery gameplay. Giving up on the MLBPA line, EA soon after launched Triple Play Baseball, a capable simulation with quality graphics and the immersive EA feel that had made the company's other sports titles stand out. However, the 16-Bit Triple Play offerings also lacked the MLB license, and were buggy. (If you had, for example, a runner on first who had rounded second before a fly ball had been caught, you could return to the bag by leaving the base-paths and running across the infield grass.) EA kept Triple Play around for the length of the N64/PlayStation era, but the games gradually declined in quality, becoming increasingly arcadey over the years. The last of the Triple Play offerings for PS, N64, and PS2 have not aged favorably.

Three strikes did not make an out for EA, however, and the company inaugurated its fourth attempt at a baseball franchise with MVP Baseball 2003. The game featured very good graphics and a meter-based pitching and fielding mechanic, adding an unprecedented level of depth to aspects of baseball that were typically underdeveloped in even the most thoroughgoing simulations to that point. MVP 2003 was still far from perfect, though: just listen for the excessively woody, wallopy bat-on-ball sound effect and you'll quickly understand why the game is best enjoyed with the volume muted.

The next year, though, EA finally delivered its long-awaited baseball masterpiece. MVP Baseball 2004 kept all the positive features of its predecessor while polishing the presentation. The result was one of the most beautiful representations of America's pastime in any artistic medium. The confines are comely, with lovingly rendered major league stadiums, chatter-friendly minor league parks and even some classic old-timey ball-yards. As for gameplay, MVP 2004 segues from pitcher-batter duels to making the putout to slow-motion replays with a silky smoothness, transforming this sport commonly criticized for its glacial pace into a delightfully breezy visual and tactile experience. Every time you go yard, you feel it in your forearms. And you'll go yard a lot, as the game is generous with the homeruns; that said, MVP Baseball 2004 never feels like anything other than a straight-laced simulation.

If you’re looking for a better baseball game than MVP 2004, you’re really only left with the following year's MVP 2005. Even with the more powerful systems that came along in subsequent years and decades, few baseball games since have even approached these two EA offerings in quality. While MVP 2005 is the superior version, your correspondent confesses a special partiality for MVP 2004. It is, after all, the last game in which you can play as his beloved Montreal Expos, the only means by which you can still sky a towering blast into the bone-white ceiling of that major league mausoleum Stade Olympique while decked in blue pinstripes. On those grounds alone, MVP Baseball 2004 will never, for your correspondent, get old. It’s the spring, summer and fall of 2004 forever.

Mortal Kombat XL

The double-entendre evoked by the Roman numerals in the title of Mortal Kombat XL, while only minimally clever, nonetheless speaks volumes as to what the game actually offers. Here we have the most polished, most complete version of the tenth iteration of the legendary Mortal Kombat series, well-peopled with thirty-plus characters including newcomers like the pert, pony-tailed Cassie Cage, millennial daughter of Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade, as well as the six-gun-slinging Roland of Gilead rip-off Erron Black.

Leatherface-hugger

It is, however, the all-inclusive downloadable content which not only makes XL truly worthy of the Mortal Kombat mantle, but also further burgeons the franchise's legacy. Out of the box, we are graced with four characters external to but totally amenable with the MK universe: these are the eponymous sci-fi super-beasts from Alien and Predator, as well as insuperable slasher-cycle icons Jason Voorhees and Leatherface. We have, of course, already witnessed Alien vs. Predator in a series of cinematic endeavors bearing that very title, though the peculiar species of manic, Manichean matchup that Mortal Kombat makes possible justifies a re-visitation of that particular battle. And while Jason and Leatherface have previously appeared in horrendous sprite-based releases for NES and Atari 2600, respectively, we had never until the release of XL seen them rendered in polygonal HD (at least until we got to be the hockey-masked maniac in 2017’s Friday the 13th: the Game), and we had certainly never seen them go one-on-one. Thus, XL facilitates a horror-movie dream match, Jason vs. Leatherface, a film you can play out over and over again across various backdrops from the Mortal Kombat mythscape. And how about Jason vs. Alien, Predator vs. Leatherface, or even Jason vs. Scorpion? The list of possibilities goes on and on. In essence, XL is the Mortal Kombat franchise fully realizing its own slasher, splatterpunk and even sci-fi sensibilities.

These were briefly explored earlier on in its 2011 precursor, which included a somewhat tepid representation of Freddy Krueger among its selectable characters. XL does far better justice to its sci-fi and horror guest stars, however. On account of its veritable shock-and-schlock, mashup-mandating Jason Takes Outworld aesthetic, then, Mortal Kombat XL will prove to be a collector's item, at least for horror and B-Movie fans.

Friday the 13th

By 1989, the sanguinary Friday the 13th series and its bloodthirsty antihero Jason Voorhees had thoroughly saturated the North American marketplace. The movies, aesthetically and conceptually lacking though they may have been, were ubiquitous in popular culture, with a sequel in release or in production every single year in the 1980s. There was also a TV series bearing the Friday name and font which managed to gain modest critical acclaim—in no small part due to the complete absence of Jason Voorhees from the show. Alice Cooper had even laid down a straining shock-rock record—“The Man Behind the Mask”—inspired by the goalie-masked goliath. Inevitably, given the Nintendo Entertainment system's embeddedness in the day-to-day lives of children of the mid-to-late eighties, video-gaming was another market Friday the 13th would encroach upon, the R-rated aesthetics of the movies notwithstanding.

Friday the 13th for the NES took the form of a side-scroller in which players control one of six Crystal Lake camp counselors. Traversing water, woods and cabins, all the while battling wolves, crows and zombies (all of which are apocryphal to the movies), the goal is to find and defeat Jason Voorhees not once, not twice, but thrice. In the meantime, the rampaging Jason is killing not only the counselors, but also the children—yes, children—vacationing at the camp. Jason's mother's head, which has now acquired the extra-canonical ability to fly, also makes an appearance as an adversary.

This discussion of Friday the 13th’s gameplay is moot, however, as the game is unplayable. Its controls are exceedingly frustrating, leading to death after death for the counselor under your control (and the children, to boot). Moreover, the camp's confines are mostly rendered in bright, primary colors and thus provide little in the way of chills. The programmers, of course, had very little to work with given the 8-bit NES format, but still, one gets the impression they didn't even attempt to approximate the Friday the 13th aesthetic. There is also, perhaps most disappointingly, no opportunity to play as Jason. This is not a huge loss, however, as Jason is, when you do find him, clad in what looks to be a purple track-suit of some sort—seemingly more like senior's active wear than the ragged waterlogged vestments we would expect of an undead serial killer who dwells at the bottom of a lake.

I wouldn't recommend this game to even the most diehard fans of the film series. Firstly, it received far too wide a release to have any value as a collector's item. Secondly, it evades the hallowed so-bad-it's-good status, which may apply to movies such as those in the series, but really doesn't work for video games. Even the recent Friday the 13th release for Xbox One and PS4, while far from perfect, is at least able to capture the general feel of the films. The NES game, by contrast, is an abomination. Collectors would be better off saving their cash for anything else related to the series. This reviewer would instead suggest perusing EBay for the two—that's right, not one, but two—novelizations of Friday the 13th Part 3. One is by Simon Hawke, the other by movie-adaptation legend Michael Avallone. Even if you despise Friday the 13th or the act of reading itself, you will still appreciate these novels far more than this game.

Chrono Trigger

The holy grail of game collecting is, quite arguably, Chrono Trigger for Super Nintendo. Complete-in-box, you’ll be paying hundreds of dollars on EBay; for a sealed copy, you may pay over a thousand. Even without a box and manual, a Chrono Trigger cartridge can run well over a hundred. The price is warranted, for the demand is there. Even when we look past the trans-historical intrigue of the story-line spanning prehistoric pasts and dizzying technocratic futures, even when we look beyond the endearing banter of the characters and the silky-smooth combat system and the enchanting trill of the soundtrack, Chrono Trigger sparks, perhaps most palpably, a strikingly vivid nostalgia. Just as the characters in the game jump through time, so too does CT shuttle us back to childhood, when we were most capable of complete immersion—often from waking to slumber—in a video game and the luxuriant world it conjured on our television screen. The Chrono Trigger cartridge is itself a teleporter to the past. But, as TV and movies recurrently warn us, there is no time travel without risk: If you do put down the admirable amount of cash necessary to secure a sealed or near-mint copy of Chrono Trigger, be prepared to face the temptation toward unlimbering the cartridge from its casing, husking it in your old weather-beaten SNES, and firing it up once again. With this possibility in mind, I would recommend the diligent collector pick up a relatively cheaper, possibly even disc-only copy of the Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy II re-release for the PlayStation 1. Herein you can sublimate quite satisfactorily your urge to re-experience the epic expedition of Crono, Marle and Lucca—and also your youth, too—without sundering the value of a bona fide collector’s item.