The Comic Review #91: Isom #1-2

 

I haven’t been feeling up to talking about goofy crap for a while. A few days after my posts about Canadian TV channels because that’s the kinda shit I like to talk about on this sad sad blog. I just didn’t feel like talking due to several issues going on in my life, one of which I don’t want to sully by mentioning it here. It was pretty serious and all that. I don’t want to get into it because this article will be very angry and all that. Just letting you know I’m gonna get into some serious stuff with this article. Discussions of hateful people going on about transgender people. So if you don’t want to read any more I can understand that. Anyway, Jughead Jones has nothing to do with this comic but seeing as the writer of this comic (and owner of his own shitty company) likes to DCMA people who criticize him off the internet I’m not using any images from his garbage comics so I picked Jughead because I like him.

There’s going to be a LOT of boring boring history I have to get into before we get into anything here. It all started in 2017 with a complete shithead known as Diversity and Comics on YouTube. He would get angry at how every Marvel Comic and DC Comic and others had become “SJW” because they had characters that weren’t white people. He made really bad review videos about him yelling about comics that were pretty good honestly. I went and read these comics because how awful his reviews were. They were well done for the most part. I can’t say anything positive about that America Chavez comic written by that lady who’s name I can’t remember (her comic was still better than the one I will talk about in this article). He made a comic and it was really bad but that’s besides the point. He was gonna get it put out by some no name company I don’t remember the name of. Then Mark Waid came in and called that company and let them know that this guys fans had been fucking harassing writers and artists of these SJW comics.

One of the people that was harassed was Magdalene “Mags” Vissagio a trans woman (why do trans woman always pick names that haven’t been used since the Middle Ages?) they would say all the usual stuff to her. You know the stuff I don’t really want to sully this blog with. And they’d say this stuff was criticism. You know what actually is criticism, it’s THIS: Mags writes decent enough comic books with a decent sense of humour and entertainment value that literally have terrible endings. She cannot end a comic to save her life. It was really bad time to be a comic creator who wasn’t the whitest white man (and if you were a white man who helped them you’d get tons of shit too). Then comic creators for DC and Marvel joined in at the behest of Ethan Van Sciver. He got a bunch of conservative wieners to make comic books. The movement was named Comicsgate because of another movement called Gamergate. This is just a small history because if I wanted to go over everything I’d have to probably talk to a lot of people on Twitter and make like a six hour documentary. This is a lot of words to say “Twitter/YouTube drama over comic books that I look at because I’m very sad.”

I finally got so sick of it all that I want this post to be my final word on the whole thing and probably hopefully get off Twitter (which Elon Musk somehow made even shittier!) for good. Never going back to that site. I will say one thing here: Not a single comic made by these guys that I have been able to read due to piracy (because fuck if I’m going to give money to harassers) has been any good. They were all pretty bad and you should know that I’m a forgiving reviewer of things. I am not a hard man to entertain. I’m also going to be fair and say that things were said and done on the comics creators side that was not very fair either. I don’t really want to get into it but one person tried to find the Diversity and Comics guys son and I’m of the idea to leave the family out of this stuff.

There’s more people involved with this now but I don’t want to get into the drama involving this comic. I just want to discuss it. It was written by Eric July and drawn by a very competent artist named Cliff Richards. Competent but has no real flair to it. There’s people who have less competence than Richards but somehow at least have flair. I don’t like his art as all but Rob Liefeld is way less competent than Cliff Richards but has more flair and charm. Cliff Richards art is honestly really boring. There’s nothing there to praise or get angry at. I’m saying this now because the real problems is the writing. Oh god the writing.

Isom #1 is honestly quite boring. Isom (Avery Silman) comes out of retirement to help look for a Family Friend named Jasmine. He goes to a gangster named Darren who he knew as a teenager and some Super powered guy named Santwan fights Avery Silman and he gets thrown out of a window. He sees some random lady (who I will be fair and say has a decent design from whoever designed her and her costume. I will be fair one more time later on too!) who is named Yaira. They know it each other but she’s fighting General Zod and his group of Kryptonians (he ripped them off lol). He then goes back to the Club and fights Santwan again. He then talks to his sister and then gets a new super suit. That’s all that happens in 96 pages. It’s pretty dull.

Isom #2 opens up with Avery’s sister going to her job that if you showed in a Marvel Comic they would call woke. Avery’s sister is an intelligent black woman but that’s only woke when Marvel Comics does it I guess. Or DC Comics. Anyway Darren shows up and hurts her. Then he gets kicked out of the building and the people working there that helped him getting fired. Darren is one dumb motherfucker. Then Isom in his new suit goes back to his farm and finds out that Sam one of his workers has been kidnapped by Satan Monkey’s helpers. No I’m not joking. They are literally throwing the plot of #1 about helping the missing girl which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a story. Unless it’s some artsy stuff by David Lynch or something. Most stories seem to want to finish up their story before dropping it pages into #2. Also it kinda ruins the finding the girl story because Isom if he can beat fucking Demons should be able to kick the shit out of Darren’s asshole.

He then meets a new character who is Libertarian Man who is a Firefighter that you pay to fight fires (I should also tell you that these people hate when comics get “political” but are okay with this because they are dickholes) and get DNA and other help from. He tells Isom all about a woman he must go and this is the other thing I’m gonna be fair about, she is pretty well designed and her costume is pretty cool. Simple but cool. Her name is Bloodruth. Also somewhere between this (I am not re-reading this) they waste like 4 pages introducing a Wrestler guy. I don’t even remember if they name him. I just thought you’d like to know that. Oh, I also forgot that they tried to kill Avery’s sister’s boss. Darren the gangster did it. I forgot because the character is literally that boring.

He teams up with Bloodruth and they go fight some demons. They then talk about hell and Alternative Dimensions. Eric July talks down on Alternative Universes because he thinks they are lazy and no matter what stories have been told within them. He said he wouldnt do that stuff and he did, within 2 issues. Alternative Dimensions are the same damn thing Eric. I don’t care what any of you goobers say. Not that you’ll ever get off twitter to yell at me on this blog anyway. I’ll just ignore anyone who isn’t the one usual comment-er. Anyway they fight the demons until the head demon wants Isom dead. The issue ends.

There’s more stuff, like Isom being an unlikable hero and his backstory which involves him fighting a boring monster (how the hell do you draw a boring monster) and having a girl he doesn’t even know dying. This is the kinda thing that would make most heroes do even better. Work even harder to save more people. It would have worked if Isom even knew the person. Anyway Isom is unlikable, he literally takes a nap before saving Sam from the Hell Demon Monkeys (which should look cooler) and in issue one talks about how he wants to get Darren for making him look bad and no longer cares about Jasmine. Isom sucks.

FINAL VERDICT: Isom is the worst comic book I’ve read. It is a passionless piece of entertainment. No one really cared that much except maybe the designer of the characters and even then only for like two of them. Isom is even worse than Marville, which at least was interestingly bad. Isom is dull as shit. I would rather read every Deadpool appearance from 1991 to 2023. Thirty two years of shit than read another issue of Isom. I’d rather watch every episode of Mama’s Family, Charles in Charge and The New Adventures of He-Man on repeat for a week than read another issue of this. You’d think from reading my synopsis of Isom #2 that it was at least more entertaining than the first issue but nope, still dull as shit. I’d watch Clutch Cargo, the 1981 movie Night of Horror and every single thing starring Casper the Friendly Ghost before going back to see any more Isom. This thing is a train wreck and somehow it’s also very fucking boring. I don’t know how but he at least achieved that much!

Talking about Teletoon and the Family Channel and probably other Canadian TV stuff.

 I really enjoyed writing that weird bizarre mess of an post about YTV. It was fun to discuss the actual channel that I watched things on. It had personality and it was fun to discuss that. I’m sure there’s even more that I can discuss involving YTV so who knows a second part might end up coming. I really don’t know. There are shows that I can’t really talk about as an actual article themselves but they might pop up as an actual article. I dunno, I’m writing this at like seven thirty after only a few hours of sleep so who knows how bad it will be but I feel like talking about these channels too.

The Family Channel started on September 1st, 1988, same day as YTV. The thing was The Family Channel was a premium cable channel and I don’t think YTV was (and if it was it was not for a very long time as I remember having it very early on in my life, like maybe five years old.) For I believe at least seven years from 1988 to 1995 The Family Channel was something that only came to me several times a year. I think it might have been twice a year. It would show up along side TBS and I think maybe a movie channel. There was three channels that would be scrambled (and yes I would sometimes just watch things like DuckTales scrambled because I didn’t feel like playing NES or with my toys) and the second they became unscrambled I would watch for that weekend or week. It was never longer than a week and sometimes I’d be watching the same damn thing that was on the other channels but it felt like I HAD to take advantage of watching that episode of Scooby Doo on TBS instead of ASN or whatever. Man I should talk about ASN too.

Anyway in like 1995, our cable provider just popped in more channels. I remember that’s when we finally got a Fox affiliate because that’s where I would watch Sailor Moon or Mega Man on because watching those shows very early in the morning was much better than being completely rested for school and Mr. Kelly’s shitty classes. The Family Channel was mostly for Disney related things, Like when the Disney Afternoon stopped being a thing you had to go to Family Channel to enjoy most Disney things (except weirdly enough ASN showed Duck Tales) they would also show the British show Art Attack! which my sister liked but man I was like HEY GET TO DARKWING DUCK. The Family Channel pretty much lost everything related to Disney by 2011 when Disney finally decided to bring the Disney Channel to Canada themselves. Yes, it took that long. I was legit surprised when I saw that The Family Channel is still around when watching TV recently. It was wild. They show Wild Brain shows now which is like the corpses of DiC, Cinar (a canadian cartoon creator for like at least a decade or two) and other companies I don’t care about. Except for weirdly enough 1989-1998 sitcom Family Matters. Urkel is still an amazing thing in 2023!

Now this was something pretty wild. On October 17, 1997 this channel popped up. It was in the 40s on my TV if I recall correctly, or late 30s. I remember how happy I was when I realized I could program my silly TV from 1992 to skip channels. I had around 50 or so channels and I got them down to like 12 because those were the only ones I cared about. It was honestly enough channels for me at the time. It was impossible at literally any time of day not to find at least something to enjoy on at least one of those channels. I remember I think I kept the car channel (or something like that) because it showed reruns of Speed Racer.

Anyway speaking of anime Teletoon showed all kinds of stuff. Like they would show the crazy violent anime like Ninja Scroll. Then show you weird Canadian cartoons. I think I saw The Cat Came Back at least 12 thousand times thanks to Teletoon. Teletoon wasn’t a channel I really watched for it’s morning or even afternoon shows. Not even early evening, no Teletoon was a channel for 8:30 and later on weekends (unless Futurama, Family Guy and King of the Hill were on Tuesdays and not Sundays because it seemed like Fox wanted to kill those shows because they didn’t get Simpsons numbers day one.) At one point Teletoon pretty much became my “leave this on in the background and maybe stop to watch some TV shows” while I fiddled around on the Internet talking to people about NES games and horror movies. Among other things. Teletoon would literally show weird British Cartoons like Pond Life and Captain Star (this is when I would realize I was up way too late), animated series like Duckman, Mission Hill, Undergrads, The Oblongs, Clone High and many others I can’t remember at the moment. Oh and tons of Hanna Barbera stuff and for a fan of that stuff like me it was very entertaining. I would literally start watching at like 8:30 and not stop until the channel would go of the air for like 3 hours because tv channels needed to sign off for like decades. It was glorious.

Sadly it all had to end. They removed all the shows (I mean most of them had only 13 episodes but still!) and replaced it with stuff like Futurama. I’m not trying to trash Futurama, Futurama is fucking great, I’m just trying to say that it was kinda special that they had a weird mix of shows instead of stuff you could easily find (or new stuff I did not care about period). It was way more charming then reruns of something that you could easily find at that point. One more thing I have to say is that the last TV channel I really watched, well the last three where Deja View, Comedy Gold and Teletoon Retro (are you really surprised that the guy who would probably watch stuff no one cares about from the past before the most critically acclaimed stuff from right now (or honestly since like 2010). Like I’d rush to find a complete set of Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea before I’d go to watch Breaking Bad or something new?) I don’t think I even got to enjoy any of these channels for a very long time (they came out in 2007 and I think I got them sometime in 2014 or 2015 and they were cancelled in 2015 well bought out by Cartoon Network Canada and man was I fucking pissed. Transformers and He-Man and all that stuff was so much more fun to watch to me then most new Cartoon Network shows. I’m sorry, I don’t care how much you tell me Steven Universe is an amazing show with great lore, I still would watch the silly ass wacky Adventure of the Week 80s cartoon over it. I don’t care. The worst fucking part of it all was the fucking sweet ass fact that they didn’t even do anything with the channel thing for 8 more fucking years.

Yeah, earlier this year, 2023, Cartoon Network Canada finally took over Teletoon for good. It was sad but the main channel had pretty much lost all of its charm and all of the shows I cared to even watch except for like two or three. Still I guess we have another place to watch thirteen thousand episodes of Teen Titans Go now because I think that’s all Cartoon Network shows (not to trash Teen Titans Go like tons of people do these days because I think the show is actually kind of amusing, or at least the movie was.) Still it’s sad because YTV would find a place for the cream of the crop of Cartoon Network shows anyway. At least thats how it was in the 1990s. Anyway they wanted the money I guess.

I figured why not make this a threesome because that’s some EROTIC STUFF. I don’t know how much stuff I can discuss for ASN but why not because I loved tons of ASN stuff that was shown there. ASN started in May 29th, 1983, 40 years ago and was headquartered in Atlantic Canada. Halifax, Nova Scotia in fact! ASN was pretty amazing, it was your local “a bit of everything” channel. It showed kids shows, movies, a show called Breakfast Television that I remember watching way too much of for a show like that because it was on early in the morning and you want to see something to help yo uwake up. It was okay enough wake up television. I don’t remember the entire kids stuff line up but I know that I LOVED The Jungle Book anime they showed because it sort of counted as Canadian content because the entire dub cast was Canadian. It was enough to show on TV in Canada to count as Canadian content. I do not remember a single thing about it but I did love it. Shere Khan and Tarbacky (which now sounds like kind of a weird racial slur thing now) were the best.

Another great thing about ASN was the movies they would show. A movie would come on around like 7:30 or 8:00 and was a mainstream affair, I remember watching The Sandlot on there and I had that VHS tape for so long. The Sandlot is still the best movie about baseball ever and I don’t care what you have to say about that. They would also show non-mainstream horror movies in the night time, like after 12 o clock. I remember that I got to stay up to watch the remake of the Fly with Jeff Goldblum (awesome movie by the way) one night because it was Summer and also a weekend. I also remember trying to stay up to watch The Fly 2 the next night but really couldn’t because I had stayed up the night before. Another classic I got to enjoy thanks to ASN for the first time wasw the movie Dolls. I think my Dad stayed up to tape that one for my sister and me, I dunno. ASN is still going on like Family Channel and YTV but it has no real charm anymore. It’s not even called ASN, just CTV 2. Boring.

Well, let you thank you for letting me blather and bloivate over Canadian TV channels. Not even the shows. I have no idea if I will come back to this but I had a great time talking about this stuff.

The YTV 35TH ANNIVERSARY SPECTACULAR WOO!!!

 I was thinking about doing another NES game review set but there’s three of them in a row and I like to make things a bit more different around here. Like A post on a different subject every day or so. I just wanted most of the Baseball shit out of the fucking way so that’s how it all happened. I also just don’t have it in me today to talk about fucking Battle Chess. You know the days when it’s hard to muster up the want to talk about things you like. Well it was mostly one of those days for me. Talking about Battle Chess on a day like today would have been impossible. It’s literally nearly impossible on the best fucking days and I want a decent review of every NES game. Or at least passable. The other reason was that I found out through a youtube video about YTV’s 35th Anniversary and I want to celebrate that and also complain about things because that’s what we do here. So I’m just gonna talk about YTV, Canada’s Premiere Kids Channel (or how it used to be that)

So, September 1st, 1988 a channel came out of the ether (actually two! a bit on them later on) in Canada. It was known as YTV. YTV showed American shows, British shows, Muppet Shows and because of laws that Canadian TV channels need to show Canadian content, Canadian shows. YTV was the thing I watched for whenever we got it in my house (I have no idea if it was day one or in like 1991 or something and I don’t care enough to really check it out) to at least 2001. I mean that’s when I stopped being a “oh man gotta sit down and watch 12 hours of television before playing 8 hours of Super Nintendo!” thing. I mean I’m sure I still watched it until YouTube came around. Also my nieces watch way too much YouTube and it weirds me out. So much of that stuff I do not think I would have a single interest in, especially the toy videos. Those would have just been a time for me to yell to my mother “WE GOTTA GET TO ZELLERS A NEW NINJA TURTLE THING CAME OUT” and go there and get it so I could play with it. I needed Television, not bite sized little clips. I wanted a narrative to my stuff, dangit!

Anyway YTV had all kinds of TV shows from all over the place during it’s run. At one point it would show movies in the evening, stuff like The Slender Thread which is about a woman attempting to commit suicide until Sidney Poitier saves her (the woman is also Mel Brook’s wife!!!! Like real life wife!!!). It’s not what you’d find on a “youth and family” channel today. The sheer wildness of it all is what I remember the most. Along with the PJs. or Program Jockeys. You see they would have set program blocks of shows. One was Treehouse (I think until it became it’s own tv channel) for the young viewers. Another one was The Zone (more on them in a bit) and THE BREAKFAST ZONE. They knew the Zone was the biggest draw to the channel. These were people, usually young adults (I believe thier ages ran from late teens to mid 20s.) that would talk to us about stuff (new shows, their lives, stuff like that) these people had a very nice “big brother/sister” vibe to them.

This was an idea that could have crashed and burned if they picked the wrong people but for like 35 years they did it right. Until now. They stopped having someone talk to the kids about the shows, or themselves or just do silly stuff. I mean I’m just taking the word from this YouTuber, but I can see it because the last time I watched YTV with my nieces it had a ton of the charm and everything taken out. The YTV logos used to look like this:

Now it looks like this:

It had different variations over the years but the stuff from the 1990s and 2000s and probably even early 2010s felt like YTV hired a really good graphical artist type person to create the stuff and the last one just feels like YTV got a random executive to make it in some cheap computer program in like an hour. That’s not all, they used to make unique commercials for a show. Trying to edit something so the announcer could do some goofy shit. Most of them come off kinda cringy nowadays (hey sometimes I look up YTV commercials on youtube when I’m bored) but I’ll take cringe over no fucking emotion at all! All of this is very depressing but I can totally see why they do it.

For like the first twenty five years of its existence YTV didn’t have to deal with any of the American channels. YTV was where you went to get Nickelodeon shows and Cartoon Network shows. Now you get the Disney Channel (if you wanted any Disney stuff you needed Family Channel and it was a premium cable channel that I believe I didn’t get until at LEAST 1995. Along with TBS, I used to watch it scrambled like a pervert would watch porn. It was wild) and Teletoon (I will probably blather on about them but they didn’t have the personality of YTV) became Cartoon Network Canada now. I remember when Cartoon Network killed Teletoon Retro, the last TV channel I would watch (well alongside Comedy Gold which showed old sitcoms). I didn’t get to enjoy either very long but man they were pretty great stuff.

I don’t know if Nickelodeon is in Canada now or what. I don’t watch any of this new stuff. I know people are shocked about that. However it’s not all. They have to deal with the internet and streaming and YouTube. You can easily find whatever you want on the internet, a good amount of things on streaming, and kids love YouTube, so I can see why they gutted everything that gave the channel a personality. I just think it’s pretty sad.

You know for all the things I was into as a kid there’s still things I kinda wish I had watched or enjoyed and I never thought this would have been one of them. The YTV Achievement Awards was an award show that I never cared about as a kid. It was an award show and honestly the first few shows looked drier than a British man’s sense of humour which is probably why I thought they stopped doing these after like three of them in 1992. Nope, they ended in 2000. The YouTube video that I watched that inspired that this incredibly insanely long ramble is like an overview on all of them and I’m kinda sad I missed out on at least watching one of these. I don’t even know why. I do know that at least three would have been interesting. One because it was hosted by Weird Al Yankovic who is someone I’ve been a fan of SINCE I was a kid. I think the year I got into his st uff was the year he hosted in 1994! I really feel bad that I missed out on that, even if it was something I wouldn’t have watched all of it. I should have at least watched some of it. The other two involved Newfoundlanders winning the award. That would have made for some great discussion at the schoolyard. I mean if any of the other children would have talked to me about anything instead of being like “ew the weird kid”. I dunno, but this was a pretty interesting YouTube video (although hearing about how a lot of the kids who won awards passed away very young. Very sad)

Remember when TV channels would “sign off” and “sign on”? Well if you do you are probably old enough for the retirement home but I do! They were really kinda weird. TV channels would just go to color bars for like 8 hours and then 4 hours, then 2 hours now all TV channels just stay on all the time. I don’t know but they are one of the weird things I get nostaliga for and I felt like talking about them here in the most scattershot thing I’ve ever wrote. Ever. But seeing as I will not get a chance to talk about them here because I don’t think I’m starting a post series of “RANDOM YTV THINGS WOO”. YTV Sign offs changed all over the time. At one point it was random things done by fancy kids (one of them was a fencer!) called YTV Really Me. Then some old lady talking about a place in Nova Scotia. Then then ask you to send them comments if you had any. Then you’d get the national anthem. They changed all the time and as someone who spent a lot of time up in the middle of the night I’d see a lot of sign offs and hell even a few sign ons. I just felt like talking about them.

While not a tv show this is something I remember so well from YTV. I loved Short Circuitz which were computer animated shorts, ranging from like 30 to a minute thirty that would play during the commercial breaks or in between shows like Reboot or Beasties (what we called Beast Wars in Canada. Yes I know it’s weird) and they came from The Mind’s Eye, Beyond the Mind’s Eye and Imaginaria. They are on VHS and I want to own them. My personal favorites were the rubber ducky one shown above (it would get faster and faster and was always an amusing delight to me and my sister) and Styro the Dog which is still the best CGI thing ever made. Sorry Toy Story.

Well, I hope you enjoyed talking about these things today. I’m honestly glad that I did and didn’t force out another NES game review thing. I think forcing something out when you aren’t really into it but now I am so expect to see it soon. I cannot wait to give at least three of the next games glowing reviews and then get eh about the next two. Anyway enjoy.

WHOS READY FOR SOME FUCKIN BASEBALL ON THE NINTENDO WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

 

This time it’s nothing but baseball. So I’m going to just come out and do this right after the last one and finally finish up this shit for at least a little while. Thankfully after the Bs there’s like four Baseball games and that’s good enough for me. Plus it will take quite some time to get there. Woo. Time to get this shit done.

I was nice enough to despite not being able to even get anywhere in a Baseball game for the NES, put Base Wars as the okay game. The game I want to at least play again. That game I want to be able to end up enjoying some day some how. That game I want to get good at. This game Baseball Simulator 1,000. I couldn’t give a shit about. I actually enjoy some Culture Brain games. Or maybe that was Electro Brain. Or maybe both. It’s weird that two companies decided BRAIN needs to be in our name. Anyway it’s a baseball game that I always end up knocking fly balls or giving it to the computer and it has no robots. So in other words this game can piss off.

This game has oodles of charm and I actually can get at least a hit or two in the game! Which is insane for me when it comes to a baseball game. Literally insane. I’ve never played baseball in real life, or watched it on the tv, or even know the complete set of rules. I just remembered I have Dusty Diamond Softball and Softball is like the same damn thing and I will not hear any arguments on this. I mean port will probably pull of the list of differnces and make an argument but I will not listen. Anyway this game you could actually save and you could literally just play 2 games (or 419410) in your game season. I will rate this one OKAY because I want to like it more than I do.

I remember playing this game once when I finally got it because there was a time when I was collecting NES games and this one was somewhat rare even if it was just Baseball. I didn’t spend almost $30 on a copy like people have to do today if they somehow want all the games. Anyway you know how I said Baseball Stars was a charming game that I want to be able to get good at like Base Wars. Well Baseball Stars 2 removes all of that charm and is pretty much worthless and not worth a shit.

You might be thinking “Claw, you missed 3 games” No, I’m reviewing all four of these games in one post. When I said that I was going to review the original game and others in one paragraph to make it easier but decided against it because it wasn’t fair. THIS is the game series that made me think I should do it. Just this one. The rest of the games that got a trilogy or a series or whatever at least deserve a paragraph to their own. However for these piles of shit I am taking a mulligan. If I were some weirdo on twitch trying to beat every NES game I wouldn’t let people decide because I know what games are going to be last and not ever in the discussion. The Ultima games, the rice sims and Bases Loaded. Bases Loaded is actually the worst series on the NES. At least fucking Ikari Warriors 3 was almost competent. Bases Loaded is the worst Baseball series of games ever and I don’t know how it got to four. I really really really hate the fucking “from the eye of the pitcher view” it throws me off EVEN MORE than any other baseball game on the system. I’m reviewing all four of these games here by saying this statement: I’ve played just about every NES game licensed and unlicensed since getting my own personal computer in 1997 via emulation or physical cartridge. I’ve also played a good amount of Famicom games and I’d say just about every single European/Australasian game too (and hell I’ll review them too after I do the American set, just the stuff America did get though) and I think today, 2023, 38 years old was the first (and probably last) time I ever booted up Bases Loaded 3 or 4. It was to see if they still kept that awful pitcher view shit and they did. Also Bases Loaded 4 goes for $60 and makes me hate Nintendoage, Youtube and everything so much more. If someone said “Hey would you make all collectables worth as much as they were between 1998-2006 by pressing this button” That person better get out of the way because I’m jumping as high as my fat ass can and crushing that fucking button with my humongous ass. The fact that this game goes for that much is insane. This game went for nothing because no one wanted it just for a full set. Fuck people making the rarity of shit the big deal and not the fun of finding a new game. Anyway, don’t bother telling me to review Bases Loaded 2, 3 or 4 in actual paragraphs because I’d rather get to better games (and worse ones that are more interesting to discuss)

Good Games: 24

Bad Games: 26

Okay Games: 7

Reviewing Yet Even More NES Games, Baby!

 I will probably run out of “comedic” titles for these posts sooner or later but I also have 65,4050 games to review. And I’ll do it because I’m having fun. It’s entertaining and enjoyable, brings me back to the forum days when you’d just make a post about I dunno Barbie being a poopy game or something. I dunno. This might be the worst batch so far. Not a looker in the bunch. So expect some yelling and screaming and being confused.

I was fearing these games the most. These are the last games I want to play and the last games I want to ever try and beat. It’s not even that I hate stragety games. I played Desert Commander among others and actually had fun. However there’s several things that make Desert Commander more appealing to me than Bandit Kings. Desert Commander is genuinely pretty easy to get into where as Bandit Kings reads like a book that’s been written in a dead language. A dead alien language. As in aliens from outer space aliens. I mean I am still not very good at Desert Commander but I never ever know where to start with any of these games I lovingly refer to as rice sims. The Other problem is the time it takes to beat one of these games. This one, which seems to be one of the shorter ones takes almost 7 hours to beat. I’m sorry but you need to be a thrilling game with a thrilling plot and all kinds of crazy awesome shit for me to play you that long to completion. I know people love these games but I cannot for the life of me not rate them as crap. I even tried to get into Romance of the Three Kingdoms with the help of a YouTube video and got like maybe an hour in before I realized I had messed something up. I don’t forgive that kinda stuff in games I was having an amazing super fun with (instead of almost kinda having fun). I’m sorry but rug pulls are for Sierra Games and nothing else. I do not get nor do I really care for these games and I never see that fact changing.

Before I go on to really yell and scream at this game let me tell you that I don’t think it’s a game that’s as bad as people make it out to be. Kind of like Back to the Future people would call this game one of the worst. Yes, It’s a bad bad game (for a brand that I don’t think ever had any good games) but I can name 200 games that I would play this over. It’s awful horse shit that I do not enjoy in the slightest but there’s way worse out there. Let’s get to the bad shit in this game. First off Barbie moves slow as hell making it hard to get out of the way of an enemy or boss. Secondly Barbie is a giant fucking easy to hit sprite. Like I don’t think it’s even more possible for a sprite to get hit more than this. Third this game is weirdly harder than a fucking Barbie game should have been. Lastly this game is dull as hell, the levels are just random horse shit that will either be annoying to get through or uninteresting. Nothings keeping you from coming back a second time to play this game. The reason that makes me somewhat stand up for this game is those 200 I mentioned do things that are even fucking worse.

The First Person View did not work on the NES. Yes, there will be games that I praise and even enjoy that have that in them. However they at least used it sparingly. The Bard’s Tale everything is First Person outside of the battles. I would always always get lost so quickly in First Person View mazes. However those games I will praise at least made it so that I wanted to get out of the maze and would fumble around until I did. This game just makes me want to turn it off the second I get stuck in a maze. You say “buy graphing paper and make a map” two things with that, my mother, would have been like “use the regular paper we have.” because my mother is an old lady who doesn’t spend money. She literally bought sausages no one in the house liked and would not eat repeatedly because they were cheaper, despite the fact if no one ate them she would lose money. You think she’s gonna throw some dough at me to buy graphing paper for a game she knows I’d lose interest in? Yeah. I was also not going to spend what little money I had to get the fancy graphing paper that made for better maps either to be fair. I didn’t have much and whenever I did get any I spent it on comics or other NES games. My point is that First Person View also looks dreadfully ugly on the NES and I don’t think it looked good in 1991 or whenever FCI made this game. I know people go gaga for these games and I’m glad for them but again I think it’s a big old pile of dog shit that I got on my shoe. Also I ain’t making no maps now if I ever decide to force myself to beat this game (I wanted to beat every NES game at one point and a part of me still does) it will be doing the fumbling around thing because I am also way too lazy to make any maps. Either way I don’t like this game. Turn Based RPGs on the NES for the most part aged way too badly for me.

I really want Base Wars to be one of the baseball games that I like. I want to put it on the sports games list of sports games that I approve of. I keep playing it hoping to finally get somewhere or even somewhat good at it. I don’t even expect to ever beat a season but a game or two would make me at least want to play this game again. I’ve never beaten a single game in any baseball NES game. I’ve gotten near the end of fucking Battletoads. I’ve beaten The Terminator and Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends. AND DR. CHAOS. AND DR. JEKYLL. Yet not ever beat the computer in any NES baseball game. I always never hit a home run or fly balls or literally sometimes hit the ball right into their hands. The reason I want to like this game is because it’s from Ultra aka Konami and I really don’t like not liking a Konami game because even the worst game they clearly polished that son of a bitch to look perfect. The second reason is that you play as fucking robots and that’s fucking cool. I want to be a Weird Mech Robot thats just designed to play Baseball. You also fight the other Robots! How the hell? Man if I make it to heaven the one question I’m going to ask God is “how the hell do you play Baseball games on the old NES?” because that’s the thing I want to know THE FUCKING MOST. I can do it somewhat sometimes with Bad News Baseball on my BEST DAY EVER. So yes, I’m calling in the Almighty to help me with this. To be fair I will rate this game at least okay because I know that Konami put tons of effort into it. Those guys were never slouches.

I’m glad the majority of Baseball games start with the letter B and they didn’t create ZOMBIE BASEBALL THIS GAME IS ACTUALLY COOL IF YOU CAN PLAY IT RIGHT or something like that. Nope for the most part I will be done with at least one sport when the B’s are done, actually I’ll be done even quicker but that’s for the next post. Anyway, Baseball is a black box game and i’m sure if I looked it up and saw some shitty falling apart box and but the hangtab was still there someone would still ask 2,000 dollars and get it. I won’t get into the entire rant because this game doesn’t deserve that. I don’t have to be good at Baseball games to tell you that this one IS shit. Even if I was the master of Baseball on the NES and no one could touch me and even Bo Jackson went “Wow This guy knows Baseball!” even then I’d say this game was worthless. It’s slow, it’s clunky, it’s better forgotten as a relic that it clearly is. Fuck this game.

Good Games: 24

Bad Games: 20

Okay Games: 6

NES Game Reviews Because I haven’t Reviewed Enough Already! Doing the B’s

 Well, I’m all fired up and finished writing about Aladdin but still want to write more so I figured why not blab on about five more NES games. It’s easy, I’ve already played the games and all I need to do is blab on about them for way way way too long. Which I can easily do because that’s ALL I do. I love blabbing so much. So very much. It’s wonderful.

If you look up the word confusing in the dictionary you will find a picture of this game and nothing else. This game just wants to confuse the hell out of you. You have to find like at least 35 items and put them back in the right place. Like Milkshake. Yeah I think Marty might have ordered a Milkshake in the future era? I can’t remember because I was too busy being entertained by like everything else in the movie. I just believe that Milkshake is one of the items you have to remove. You also have to spell out the word so if you get some word you don’t know too bad the item explodes and you have to do the weird mini game again. Most of which are not fun. The game also makes you go to 3 different eras to bring stuff back, didn’t want to make it fun or enjoyable to you by say having you have to bring back items from the 1950s in the 1950s area. Nope sometimes you have to bring a item you find in the 1950s to 2015. Also you have to look around very similar LARGE areas that have no map. Some people complain about Metroid not having a map but that game is MUCH easier to look around. The most insane part is that after you beat Part 2 you literally get Part 3 where I think you have to find just 10 items and put them back in that same area. No jumping to other areas or anything. Wow Imagine making a game you could beat in say an hour and have fun with instead of a game that takes you 15 hours and makes you want to rip your hair out and shove it down your throat in an attempt to end the pain.

This is the first beat em up game I plan to discuss. Beat em up games are either really good or really bad. You either have creative enemies to fight and decently sized stages or you have the same enemy 8290 times to fight in a stages that never seem to end. Bad Dudes is mostly in the first category except it’s got some jank. The controls are not perfect and that really drags this game down. This is not a bad game. It’s still fun enough once you get used to how the controls work but why play it when Double Dragon, Double Dragon 2 or even 3 are just over the horizon, or TMNT 2 or 3. Or POW. Or Renegade. I’d rather play those games over this one but Bad Dudes is still a decent enough game. It would get an OKAY ranking. If you could find it for $5 (good luck lol) then I’d say pick it up. There’s nothing more to say about Bad Dudes than that.

I’m in the B’s so that means a lot of Baseball games and you will probably expect me to completely trash this game or at least not be interested in it. The problem is I actually like this game. It’s like one of the two Baseball games I’d play willingly. It’s one of the few I can actually score any kind of goal in. Every other time I end up hitting like 202429429 Fly balls or the computer beats my ass. The computer still beats my ass in this game but Tecmo (remember that name people!) actually made a baseball game that I can actually kinda get into. That’s worth a million dollars. This game is charming and silly and has Bunny Rabbit Umpires. Also cameos from Mr. T if I recall correctly. Even if I thought the game was crap I’d still tell you to buy it just for that.

Remember just like a paragraph ago. Like before the baseball game where I talked about how beat em up games needed to move fast and furious to be good. Different enemies doing stuff. Still this game is probably one of the poorest and shittiest Beat em ups regardless of console. Period. This game is not only incredibly slow moving it also saddles you with a ton of shitty moves you have to try to pull off with shitty controls. I mean the game tries by having you fight charming and fun enemies like weird looking punks and gorillas but its so hard to fight them. It’s also got not really great graphics (they try to be cartoony and fun but just fail) and not very good music. A failure of a video game that I’m sure portnoyd will defend because he’s a weirdo like that.

I remember a time when black box NES games were just games, plentiful. All over the place. Before people shit their pants and went OMG THEY WERE THE ORIGINAL GAMES. Yeah they are the original games made for the NES. However most of them have dated like milk. Hell I’m sure some of them were like milk when they came out. It was weird, when I first got into collecting NES games, maybe a few of them were sought after. Now people are like OMG I GOT A HANG TAB FREE BALLOON FIGHT FOR 27 GRAND WHAT A STEAL. I mean Balloon Fight was a game I owned, a game I wanted after playing it emulation and is still a game I enjoy today. It’s a fun Joust clone. It’s just weird how they made these games into weird MONEY MACHINES. Like Donkey Kong Jr Math was a game no one cared about and now the YouTubers are like ITS RARE SO ITS COOL. No it isn’t, it’s a bag of wet shit (sorry to spoil my thoughts on it.) Balloon Fight is a simple fun game where you pop bad guys balloons. Or in the other game on the cart see how long you can stay in the air without getting hit my something. It’s a fun game. It’s a worthwhile game to own but I don’t get the people making the black box games out to be amazing masterpieces (except for like one)

Good games: 24

Bad Games: 16

Okay games: 5

The Final Episode #122: Aladdin (1994 – 1995)

 

Aladdin was without a doubt my favorite Disney movie as a kid. It came out when I was like seven and I do not know how many times I watched it with my sister as kids. I don’t even think the VHS tape worked any more when we were finally done with it. I mean we had all the Disney movies or at least a whole hell of a lot of them and the one we’d always pick was this one. It had great music, great characters, lots of fun action, a memorable plot, and Robin Williams as the Genie. I have no idea what would end up being my favorite Disney movie now but didn’t I promise to watch like all Disney movies? I think I did. I should get on that.

Anyway I even liked Return of Jafar. I didn’t watch it as much as the original movie but it was still fun. I was over the moon when I found out that the movie was getting it’s own TV show and it was one of my favourites from the Disney Afternoon. It was done by Tad Stones (that guy again?!?!) from Darkwing Duck and Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers fame. He will come up several more times when we discuss even more Disney stuff. We are just clearing up The Disney Afternoon right now people! Disney still kept doing stuff! He also teamed up again with Mr. Alan Zaslove who as I said before worked in stuff from a teenager in the 1940s to like the early 2000s. That’s one hell of a career. He must have been in his late 60s when he was doing this show.

Aladdin was shown on the Disney Afternoon and also CBS. CBS started Saturday Morning TV Fare with Captain Kangaroo in 1955. They are actually no joke still at it. I didn’t even know Saturday Morning TV was a thing any more. They work with a corporation called the Litton Entertainment (who apparently does the same for ABC owned and operated stations. This fact is literally blowing my mind.) I’m amazed but I also feel really bad for the kids who have to watch this because they can’t get YouTube or streaming or hell any other option. I mean you get one dog show and like 3 shows about History. The kid of our generation that would willingly watch something called Henry Ford Innovation Nation would have been made fun of by everyone. Literally everyone. I don’t think children of today are any more keen to watch this stuff. My mind has literally been boggled by this information. It’s wild. I also wrote this entire paragraph just to tell you all about it.

I should talk about the voice cast. Mostly it’s the same from the movie honestly, It has Gilbert Gottfried, the guy from Full House, Linda Larkin (Princess Jasmine) Frank Welker (as Abu, he’s like the greatest animal voice guy ever). The only changes are Homer Simpson now voices the Genie (and honestly does a decent job) and the Sultan’s actor is new too. The Sultan was always such a nothing character that I don’t really care enough to see who played him in either version. This episode however has one hell of a guest cast. Jim Cummings another guy that if you were making a cartoon you were legally obligated to contact him to see if he wanted in. Tress MacNeil who has voiced literally every female character since the dawn of time despite only starting voice acting in 1979. Very impressive. Keith FUCKING David, the smoothest smooth black man voice ever. To round it all out Hamilton Camp, a man who started his career in movies, tv and animation in 1946 and literally worked so much that several of his voices came out after he passed away in 2005. He will always be best known as Fenton Crackshell (aka Gizmoduck) to me.

Anyway today’s Final Episode is called The Great Rift and was written by Mark Seidenberg, not the guy who writes about science and people not being able to read or something. That’s who came up first on google until I entered IMDB to the search too. If they are the same person then wow that’s a wild career change. Anyway he started in writing for the animations in 1984 with the Snorks, then came several Hanna Barbera shows like Galtar and the Golden Lance. Then Disney with Duck Tales, Goof Troop and Aladdin. He also worked on Jackie Chan Adventures and COW Boys of Moo Mesa. The weirdest thing was he worked on the Biker Mice from Mars reboot in like 2006. I always forget that is a thing. But it is. I don’t like it.

Anyway this episode starts up with Aladdin and his pals checking out the lost city of Mesmaira. It’s all destroyed and screwed up and covered in sand. They end up finding a chest of jewels and one of them is stolen by a hawk which they had noticed earlier. Iago chases the hawk because he’s s till money crazed even though he’s now friends with a Princess and can probably get whatever the hell he wants. Anyway they bring the jewels back to the Sultan’s palace while the hawk shows us that it’s no ordinary jewel it’s an EVVVVVVVVVVVVVVIL jewel. With a person inside it! She’s the hawk’s wife Queen Deluca. The hawk is voiced by Keith David. Just to let you know.

So Aladdin and the gang are back at the Sultan’s palace and Queen Deluca changes her husband hawk into a giant hawk and causes him to grow big as hell. Anyway Queen Deluca pretty much makes Aladdin and the gang run the fuck out of the palace, turning the Sultan and Jasmine into jewels on the way out. Thankfully Abu gets the jewels into his hat before they run off. They try to come back later, the Genie gets sent to the ends of the earth. The Hawk Husband gets sent back to Mesmaria in a desert. Oh, and the other jewels turned out to be her brothers who also have powers. They are all fighting each other which brings the Great Rift to Agraba. The Great Rift just happens to be a giant green monster that is just getting more powerful. Shit is getting real.

Aladdin rescues the Hawk who used to be a man, not to be confused with DC Comics Hawkman. They team up and this time actually get the jewel from Queen Deluca, after some trouble they finally destroy it. Which turns Queen Deluca back into a normal woman, takes all her brothers powers away, gets rid of the giant monster and brings Sultan and Jasmine back. Now that they are not being influenced by the evil jewels, Queen Deluca, her husband (who is now a man again!) and her brothers are welcomed to the city of Agraba.

FINAL VERDICT: A pretty fun, energetic, enjoyable way to end this series. I always liked how magical and mystical the Aladdin world was and this just helps me to enjoy this episode a lot. People being transformed into birds. Giant monsters. Evil Jewels that corrupt people. A great little episode. 

The Comic Review #90: Dark Hawk #7-8

 

Well then it’s finally time for us to discuss Darkhawk again. This time it’s a two parter sos we can get the series over with sooner. Not soon enough for portnoyd’s liking but I like the idea of reviewing a two parter in one blog post. Feels better that way. Anyway today’s issues introduce a new supervillain to bother Dark Hawk. Created by Phillipe Bazin comes LODESTONE! She’s apparently Darkhawk’s GREATEST CHALLENGE. Ho boy.

The first part of this story is seriously light. We see Dark Hawk fight some drug dealers while a character named Bobby aka Headset watches. Headset is a big nerd but the kinda nerd from like the 1980s and 1990s the ones that were into like weird stuff like Mozart. That’s the stuff Headset always listens to on his way home. He even agreed to see Karate if Chris Powell (Darkhawk’s alter ego) and his girlfriend Cheryl Colon (lol that’s not the best chose for a last name) come to the Mozart festival with him. So he came and they now have to go there. Chris Powell is not too happy about that.

We get some stuff about Dark Hawk wondering if he should keep the criminals there with him until the cops arrive or kill them like the Punisher does. He also reads a story from a hidden journal his dad kept but it doesn’t help him because the story ends before he learns out what his dad did! His mom also has a plan to stop all the stuff that’s been happening to her (like you know attempted murders and stuff) and it might involve this Private Investigator. Or Private Eye. Or Gumshoe. Gumshoe is not a good NES game.

Anyway there’s another fight with the drug dealers that Dark Hawk takes care of easily. He then hears someone scream and he finds out that it’s Headset, He tries to get him to take the Darkhawk Amulet and become Darkhawk but he can’t because he’s now unconscious which is when Lodestone shows up and starts screaming for Chris to show her the Darkhawks power but he can’t because the amulet is with Headset. Oh man. Pretty good way to end an issue huh?

So Chris Powell is being held up by Lodestone’s magnetic powers until he just flat out lies to her because she didn’t see him change from Darkhawk to Chris she just thinks he SAW where Darkhawk went too. He does this and then worries if he should stop Lodestone or help Headset. He decides to stop Lodestone as he doesn’t want any more people to be hurt. Lodestone and Darkhawk fight until more people come around to be lookie loos. Frankly if a superhero/supervillain fight happened anywhere where I was I would run as far away as possible from it. Probably get a part of your body lazered off. Anyway we also see an ambulance come for Headset! Let’s hope he’s okay. I like this nerdy goober.

Anyway Darkhawk gives up because he thinks people will get hurt and Lodestone starts trying to use her magnetic powers to steal the amulet. Darkhawk thinks this is the end but someone comes to save him. That someone is Phillipe Bazin who wants Darkhawk’s body and everything so he can find out what makes him tick and get the power for himself. He uses this doohickey to cause Lodestone major pain. Anyway Darkhawk is now at a abandoned factory owned by Bazin and he’s beeing poked and prodded and he can’t exactly escape because of the pain the machines cause him.

Darkhawk pretty much gets a small saving grace when Allegra Bazin shows up and literally gives him enough time free of prying eyes to change back into Chris Powell. He’s smaller and everything and just has to ignore the pain long enough to change back into Darkhawk! Which is exactly what happens! Lodestone however sees him escape and they start fighting again. Phillipe Bazin shows up with the doohickey and it’s knocked out of his hands and into Allegra’s who shocks Lodestone. Darkhawk wonders if he should try to stop everyone here and now but realizes he’s overwhelmed and escapes! He also wonders why Allegra even decided to help him! QUESTIONS UPON QUESTIONS! We then go to a scene with his mom talking to her shitty private eye who after she leaves talks to someone via telephone saying that she is getting to close and won’t back off and needs to be eliminated!

FINAL VERDICT: I want to how all of this ends even though I’m sure I read the story where he does conclude like 15 years ago. Anyway I enjoyed this story and I hope to see more soon. Next issue of Darkhawk will have the Punisher and the Return of Savage Steel. We will come back to them in a few posts because next time is the second issue of Vigilante!

Even More NES Games Part Who The Hell Knows: The A’s are done and gone JERKS!

 So all of you jerks who said I wouldnt get past the A’s are WRONG. I am going to talk about all of these games. All of them. This is the easiest blog posts I can make. I don’t have to watch anything, read anything or do anything except remember these games and I’ve played the majority of them. One hiccup will be explained soon but I’ll review those games even if I have to buy them and a damn power pad!

Astyanax is yet another game that reminds me of the very early days of collecting NES games. I don’t know why I bought it because holy shit the cover art is kinda goofy. Okay, I love the dragon. He’s kinda awesome but the dude looks so goofy. Anyway It was like $5 at a store that I don’t dare go into any more because I’d have a freak out if I saw the price for Astyanax now. Way more because finding this stuff in Newfoundland now has to be hard as hell. Astyanax was the perfect $5 game. Or the perfect rental. You would bring it home, play the game, enjoy it and then forget about it for like 15-20 years. The game is a simple platformer where you fight all kinds of cool monsters. The levels are well thought out and you fight big and bold monsters as a big and bold sprite. This won’t hit your top 150 but you’ll still be glad you played it. The only problem comes from the big sprite, sometimes you will hit something you shouldn’t because of it. That’s all I can really say in negative qualities about this game. It’s one of the many “pretty good but not great” NES games. I have fond memories of it and it will still make me smile.

Here’s another game based around Greek history? I think Greek. Astyanax has something to do with the city of Troy but I don’t care enough to look it up. Athena is some kind of Goddess I think. I’m a NES game reviewer, not a theologian. This is another game made by Micronics and it just might be the worst they ever did. I hate Micronics more than any other game publisher. Even Ocean was more enjoyable. The best Micronics game is still at best awkward and probably has a better port anywhere else. This game is the jankiest piece of shit possible. You have to power up and wow they have power down items mixed in too which is annoying in any fucking game. This game is stupid and terrible but it’s somewhat noteworthy at least the Arcade version was one of the first games where you could play as a lady. Neat. Anyway the NES version has terrible everything except graphics. I actually like these cartoony graphics. Too bad the controls, sound, enemy placement, enemies themselves, everything is too annoying to bother with.

Here comes the hiccup, I had forgotten about the Power Pad (even though I might still own one) and the Power Pad games are like some of the 11 games I have never ever ever played. I will come back to them but I think I have to own the games and swallowing the fact I will have to pay $10 for a game that people would give the fuck away. You can say it’s only $10 but I could buy several comic books for that money. Things I would like to own over Athletic World. Anyway, I will be skipping over these games for right now because I can’t get the emulator to work with power pad stuff either and man playing a game that way would be so annoying too. So expect those 11 games as like a two part article at the end or something. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes has one hell of a interesting history. It’s based on a series of weird horror movie parody films from the 1970s to 1992. Then they made a cartoon for Fox Kids that I still haven’t seen anything related to it(I really like the movies. Fun goofery and they have the original live action Gomez Addams, John Astin in them!) Anyway this game is fucking horrendous. Probably the worst game being mentioned in this part. Either that or Athena. It has some annoying graphics, annoying controls, the levels themselves are just poorly designed and poorly thought out. You’ll be screaming HOW THE FUCK WAS ANYONE MEANT TO ENJOY THIS? Somehow despite being annoying and weird it’s also very short so when you get used to the games shittiness you’ll beat it very quickly. So at least the terribleness will be over quickly.

We have our first Zapper only game (I think?) and first NES game brought to us by Color Dreams. I will probably be nicer to this game than I will be to most of their other games. It’s a passable “OKAY” game. It will not change the world. It will not top the list of Zapper games (either full on Zapper games or ones that can use a Zapper like Bayou Billy). You can do what the game wants you but it’s never that frantic or crazy like other Zapper games get. I really don’t know what else to say here. This game does what it sets out to do OKAY enough. This is totally one of the most OKAY things in existence. It won’t make you scream for more and it won’t make you want to cut your balls off in frustration. It’s probably the second best Color Dreams/Bunch Games/Wisdom Tree game. Wild huh?

I think people overrate this games badness. Yes, it’s a messy awful game that isn’t much fun. You play through the same stage like at least 10 times that are broken up by 3 mini games that aren’t fun to play and you have to beat to pass on. 3 mini games that literally punish you so quickly and harshly for a simple mistake. However, I’d play this over many many other NES games that I consider way fucking worse (including this games sequel). I’d play this over Athena and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. This is just boring although the fact you get ONE chance at the last level before you get pushed back to the beginning is the largest pile of horse shit ever shovelled into a NES cart. Holy shit that garbage is mean.

The rankings now are!

Good Games: 22

Bad Games: 14

Okay Games: 4

See you! Have fun!