Mega Man 3, or "Top Spin is the worst boss weapon. Ever."

I haven't managed to finish writing the third part of my Ultima retrospective. I'm running low of synonyms for 'garbage.' So instead, dear reader, please indulge me this digression.

Once upon a time, Capcom made a game about a little blue robot who shot Tic-Tac-looking plasma bullets at other, oddly themed robots. He'd wander long, linear levels and eventually fight stronger robots and steal their weapons after crushing them beneath his cerulean boot. He'd then assault the main antagonist's fortress and rarely make it through because most people would eventually give up because without a password system and with limited lives and continues, that sucker was hard. But the game was good.

Then Capcom released a sequel. And I'd dare say it was as tough as the first, all be it in different ways. But Capcom heard the anguished cries af the frustrated gamers and added a password system. No longer would you have to finish the game in one sitting. And the game was good.

Where am I going with this? Oh, right. Mega Man 3. Some people might say this is where the series started to slide... Bad pun, sorry. What I mean is that with the addition of Rush and sliding and the fact the game was, to some degree, easier than Mega Man 2 might mean that the series was starting to go down hill. And to some degree, I suppose it did. Capcom was adding layers of complexity onto the basic framework of the first two games. But to those nay-sayers, I say this. Mega Man 3 is my favorite game in the classic series.

For the benefit of the uninitiated to the Mega Man series, here's the deal. As I described earlier, the setup is rather formulaic. You choose your stage and Mega Man goes out and hunts down eight (Six in MM1) rogue robots generally under the control of the evil Dr. Wily and defeats them. He then faces off with Dr. Wily himself in his various Skull-themed castles. Mega Man defeats Wily, Wily invariably escapes (Well, except for MM6. But they worked around that in 7,) setting up Capcom to be able to churn out sequel after sequel after sequel. To accomplish his goal, Mega Man is armed with only his trusty arm cannon. Oh, and the weapons he gains upon defeating the enemy robot masters. And sometimes he gets special extra equipment which is mostly replaced by Rush adapters from MM3 on. MM3 marks the beginning of the series attempt to throw a bit of variety into the endgame. But we'll get to that in a moment.

At the start of Mega Man 3, Dr. Wily has seemingly sworn off evil and teamed up with Mega Man's ever-gullible creator, Dr. Light, to build Gamma, and gigantic peace-keeping robot of death and destruction. To do so, Mega Man is sent out to retrieve eight crystals (That are never shown in-game) from eight mining area guarded by eight robot masters that in no way work for Dr. Wily. To help him, Dr. Light has given the blue bomber a transforming robotic dog called Rush and given him the legendary power of being able to slide. Don't scoff at the slide. It's as close as we're getting to the ability to duck until mid way through the Mega Man X series.

So off Mega Man goes to fight the likes of Needle Man, Hard man, Shadow Man and... Top Man? Yeah, I think MM3 is when they started running out of good themes for robot masters and just started attaching random nouns to the word 'Man' and hoped for the best.

You'll also encounter a mysterious robot with a trademark whistle named Break Man. Little does Speed Racer Mega Man know that Racer X Break Man is really his long lost brother. Yes. Really. Hopefully I'm not spoiling too much (Oh, and Dr. Wily is behind everything and will get away at the end of this game,) but Break Man is really a robot called Proto Man, the prototype robot created by Light and Wily prior to Mega Man. One day, he just sort of wandered off from the lab. Wily eventually found him and, apparently not knowing how obviously evil Wily was, got the robot to work for him in slowing down Megs. He donned a mask and showed up in the various levels to briefly fight his little blue brother before teleporting away.

Anyway, eight boss kills later, Mega Man returns to Dr. Light's to find out that, shock of shocks, Wily took the crystals and absconded with Gamma. Before Megs can head for the latest Skull Castle, (Where does Wily find the money to build so many of these when they keep getting blown up each game?) Mega Man has to go face off with eight Doc Robots who have taken over four of the previously cleared stages. The Doc Robots each emulate one of the MM2 robot masters. Unfortunately, you don't get to steal all their powers again. Rather, you have to use all your fancy new weapons.

The levels you revisit have all seen better days. The maps have been partially destroyed and made far more difficult to transverse. It adds a bit of variety and lets you visit completely new levels that have familiar elements to them.

With the Doc Robots disposed off, one thing stands between you and Dr. Wily. Break Man. You face off with your older brother one final time in his own level area before he teleports off. Finally, the way is open to Wily's castle. In inside, you'll face several levels, each controlled by customary end bosses including a machine that launches exploding turtles at Megs, several copies of Mega Man and the eight robot masters from MM3. After destroying Wily's latest 'Wily Machine,' he'll boot up Gamma and fight you on board the incomplete giant robot. With Gamma dispatched, the fortress will begin to collapse (Stupid load bearing bosses) and blocks will fall, seemingly killing Wily while Proto Man will pop in and rescue the blue bomber. Cue the ending sequence in which we learn who Break Man really was and one of the coolest closing themes of all time.

Right, enough plot. Let's talk robot masters and weapons. After all, that's why we play Mega Man, isn't it? To be able to blow up other robots with stolen weapons of mass destruction.

• Snake Man: He's a large walking snake... man. Yeah. The weapon you pick up off him is the Search Snakes. They're green and run along the floor and walls kind of like Bubble Man's Bubble Lead. Only they're snakes.
• Gemini Man: You face twin robots (Get it? Gemini? Twins?) who bounce around the room shooting at you. You pick up the Gemini Beam off their smoldering corpses. It is a laser that ricochets off walls until it dissipates or hits something.
• Shadow Man: He's a ninja, so he's all stealthy. His level has a tendency to shut off the light every so often. Once dead, he'll give you his Shadow Blade - a boomerang shuriken that can be shot up and diagonally. It's kind of like the Metal Blade from MM2, but less useful.
• Hard Man: He gives you his Hard Knuckle - a rocket-powered fist you shoot at the enemy. You may insert your own joke involving the words 'hard' and 'fist' here if you so desire.
• Needle Man: He's an oddly-shaped blue guy with a spring-loaded spikes on his head and a big red nose who shoots needles at you. You get his Needle Cannon upon his death. Honestly, it's just the arm cannon only with pointed projectiles instead of Tic-Tac shaped ones. Use it if you feel like a bit of variety or something.
• Magnet Man: You'd think making a complex electronic robot out of a bunch of giant magnets might not be the smartest idea, given the nature of electro-magnetic pulses. But hey, he's a fairly effective robot master all told. His weapon is the Magnet Missile, which is just that. A giant exploding magnet who shoot at enemies. The only real interesting thing it will do is that it shoots up or down depending on where the enemy is.
• Spark Man: Elec Man's 'special' brother. He's a walking spark plug with prongs for hands. You get his Spark Shot which is essentially little yellow sparks you fire at your enemy. Not all that intimidating.
• Top Man: Top Man... What can I say about Top Man? He is the laughing stock of robot masters. Well, until you hit Plant Man. His level is filled with giant tops and things that fire giant tops. And what does he do against you? He shoots a bunch of tops at you before spinning at you on the ground. But his boss weapon... Now that, that is the disappointment. They could have given you a top shooter of some sort. But no. No, we get the Top Spin - the first master weapon that is as likely to kill you as it is to nick your enemy. Mega Man spins into his enemy. The problem is that it's horribly ineffective you'll usually end up taking collision damage. The only enemy in the game it's worth using on is Shadow Man who inexplicably is weak to the damn thing. I don't know. I guess ninjas have some sort of mortal fear of ballet or something.

So that's Mega Man 3 in a nutshell. It's a good game, to be certain. It's the point in the series where the game was becoming more complex, but hasn't hit the critical mass where it collapses under it's own weight. All in all, I've found that most Mega Man series games tend to peak after their third installment. X3 was the last one on the SNES and thus, the last one before the introduction of long cut scenes filled with horrible voice acting. Battle Network 3 always seemed to me to be the last EXE game they released before they ran out of ideas. Zero really hit a high point as far as things go when it hit 3. Fortunately, they ended the series after Zero 4 before things got too weighed down. I'd be curious whether they'll eventually release a third ZX game so we can see how that stacks up. There was no Legends 3 unless you count some of the side games. And I haven't played any of the Star Force games, so hell if I know how they go.

At any rate, you can get Mega Man 3 from a myriad of locations. There's the original NES release, the Sega Genesis remake, the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the PS2, Xbox and Game Cube and more recently on the Wii Virtual Console.

Ultima Retrospective Part I, or "How to create worlds."

If there's one series that helped form my gaming tastes early on, it was the Ultima series. Created by Richard Garriot - or Lord British as he's better known - and the now defunct (Well, devoured by Electronic Arts in any event) Origin Systems, Inc., Ultima was a series of RPGs that helped define what a video game RPG is. More than that, though, Ultima introduced far more depth than most RPGs in the inclusion of the virtue system. The series evolved from a simple "Hunt down the big bad" format to include themes with more depth such as social commentary or encouraging the player to act in accordance with an ethical system. The world of Britannia was an expansive, living world and gave one a giant sandbox to play in. And then they reverted into the base RPG format for Ultima IX. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

So join me, if you will, as we walk though the history of the Ultima series. Please note, I'm going to be including a lot of spoilers here for the entire series. But really, we're talking about a series that has its roots almost thirty years ago and hasn't released a new game in the main series since 1999. I don't think I'm spoiling much more than what a cursory read of various Ultima-related Wikipedia articles would give you.

Akalabeth: Before we hit the main series, let's take a trip into Ultima pre-history. Akalabeth was created by Garriot in 1979 and is essentially a prequel to the series. It was basic (And incidentally written in BASIC) dungeon crawler and is among the first, if not the first video game RPG. The over world is a top down perspective while the dungeons are explored in a first-person 3D perspective. The Ultima series would keep to that mix of perspectives until Ultima VI. There's no real story to speak of, but it's the point of origin (no pun intended) for the entire series, so worth a mention.

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness and Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress: I'm going to cheat a little bit and hit only the basics on these two games. The reason is that I haven't really played them to any great degree. It mostly has to do with the fact they run at mach speeds on any modern computer and I lack a slow enough system to actually enjoy these games. But they're important to the series none the less, so here we go.

Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness is the true beginning to the series. You play as a stranger from another world who travels to the world of Sosaria. There, you must travel the world to free it from the grip of Mondain, a dark sorcerer who is rendered immortal by the aptly named Gem of Immortality. The Stranger transverse the four continents of Sosaria as into space and through time, completing quests, saving princesses and various other non-cliched RPG staples. Eventually, the stranger goes into the past and destroys the gem and kills Mondain. Don't try to explain how all of this didn't create hundreds of messy temporal paradoxes. It'll give you a headache.

Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress is the only Ultima (Outside Ultima IX's tutorial level) to take place on Earth. The enchantress Minax, Mondain's lover, launches an attack on the Stranger's homeland to avenge Mondain's death and clear the way for her own invasion of Sosaria. She does so by messing the the fabric of time in the Stranger's homeland. The Stranger, in turn, embarks on a journey through time and space to hunt down Minax. That Stranger and his wacky time travel.

Ultima III: Exodus: Now we're starting to enter more familiar territory for me. I first played Ultima III at a friend's house on his Nintendo Entertainment System. I didn't realize what the game was at the time, to be honest. Looking back, it seemed like just another RPG.

The Stranger is summoned back to Sosaria to take out the last vestiges of Mondain and Minax's evil, Exodus. Exodus, as it turns out, is a demonic machine and child of Mondain and Minax. Don't ask me how that works. I suspect blood rituals and a correspondence course in electrical engineering was involved.

Exodus has launched his assault on Sosaria from his home base on the Isle of Fire which is protected by a large snake called the Great Earth Serpent who can only be passed by way of a password. The lands of Sosaria had been radically altered since the Stranger last visited. It appears that when Mondain was defeated in Ultima I, a fail safe went off which caused the other three continents of Sosaria outside the Lands of Lord British to vanish. The Stranger travels Sosaria and with the help of a being called he Time Lord (No, not that one) and several companions, he assaults Exodus and defeats the infernal machine. With punch cards.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Stranger - Master hacker.

Exodus marked the end of what's called the Age of Darkness trilogy. The first three numbered Ultimas, while classics in their own right and undoubtedly influential on pretty much every RPG ever made for a computer or console, were not the greatest of games. Their plots are straight-forward "seek out bad guy and kill him dead" setups. There are interesting twists and influences that come from science fiction as much as fantasy. But it is the next three games where Ultima really starts to hit it's stride.

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar: Ultima IV was a turning point in the series and is one of the most memorable RPGs ever made. Garriot starts to pull away from the more formulaic "kill the boss" type of game. Ultima IV is a game about self-improvement. Your character isn't out to slay an evil terrorizing the land, but rather, out to gain enlightenment. There aren't many video games in existence whose main goal is a form of self actualization.

You play ask... Well, actually, that's one of the more interesting questions of the entire series. You may or may not be the Stranger, the protagonist of the first three Ultimas. Later games in the series say that you are, but with a lot of the extra races and D&D detritus that was cut back for Ultima IV, it's possible that you aren't. But, for the sake of the argument at hand, let's err on the side of the later games and say that you are, in fact, the Stranger from another land who bested Mondain, thwarted Minax, and, um, punch-carded Exodus.

The game starts off by asking you a mess of philosophical questions that align you towards one of the eight virtues: Compassion, honesty, valor, honor, sacrifice, justice, humility and spirituality. The virtues are, incidentally, all governed by three guiding principles: Love, truth and courage. Your class is defined by which virtue you favor. After that, you're thrown into the world of Britannia.

"Wait, Britannia? What happened to Sosaria?" you might ask. Well, in the wake of Exodus's death, the remains of Sosaria were geographically altered. The lands were rearranged and some major cities were destroyed. Soon after, Lord British united the remaining towns into a single kingdom, Britannia. Lord British decided to create the virtues as a system of beliefs for the people to follow and put a quest in place to find a single individual to become the avatar - the living embodiment - of all eight virtues. That's where you come in.

The bulk of the game has the Stranger travel the world and gaining points in each of the eight virtues and collecting several key relics. Once the Stranger has become virtuous enough in a single virtue, he can meditate at the shrine using the rune and mantra and attain partial avatarhood. Once he's done so for all eight virtues, he and his companions - each of whom represent one of the virtues - must travel into the Stygian Abyss and consult the Codex of Infinite Wisdom and become an avatar. I say "an avatar" because it conceivable that another avatar could come into being. It just never happened.

Ultima IV introduced many staples of the series. The virtues and their various paraphernalia, the major cities and the companions would all be seen through the rest of the series. Moongates, which were a method of travel in Ultima III, are now located near the major cities and will remain more or less where they are until Ultima IX manages to mess even that up.

The companions themselves would gain increasingly prominent roles in the coming games. Most of the companions are based or are even the alter egos (In the same way Lord British was Garriot's alter ego) of people Garriot knew. Several of the companions, like Iolo and Shamino have appeared in the Ultima games from the start. Others were added for Ultima IV. Shamino, it should be noted, was one of the eight kings of Sosaria in Ultima I and is another self-insert of Richard Garriot, meaning he's in the game twice.

Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny: Ultima V pulls back a bit from self-actualization goal of Ultima IV more towards a big bad terrorizing the world. But we're not crashing head-long into cliched territory. In fact, quite to the contrary. Ultima V contains a giant, over-riding social theme. That is the dangers of implementing a moral system as an absolute law.

Between Ultima IV and V, the Great Council, Britannia's ruling body outside of Lord British, had magically raised the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom from the depths of the Stygian Abyss - an act that will in no way come back to bite them in the ass in the next game - and enshrined it on an island now called the Isle of the Avatar. Lord British, in what I can only describe as either a fit of stupidity or a mid-life crisis, decided to enter the Underworld exposed by raising the Codex and explore, leaving his friend, Lord Blackthorn, in charge of Britannia in his absence. Things go well, at first. Blackthorn is reportedly a good man and a good leader. Enter the Shadowlords. The Shadowlords, you'll eventually learn, were born from three large shards of the Gem of Immortality - each aligned against one of the three principals - and three individuals slain by someone driven mad by the three shards' power. They corrupted Blackthorn and caused him to enact the virtues as twisted, absolute laws and oppressed the populous. Meanwhile, Lord British is captured and imprisoned in the underworld.

Iolo and Shamino summon the Avatar back from Earth to help save Britannia. The Avatar collects a number of his old companions and sets off to end Blackthorn's tyrannical rule, slay the Shadowlords and free Lord British.

Where Ultima IV was mostly about the soon-to-be Avatar learning the meaning of the eight virtues, Ultima V is about showing how those same virtues could be twisted into a rigid, oppressive code of laws. You and your companions are considered outlaws for not submitting to the new virtue laws. Interestingly, you can't directly confront the "main boss" of the game, Lord Blackthorn. It is impossible to kill him in combat, even with the game's one-hit kill weapon, a glass sword.

Ultima VI: The False Prophet: I hadn't even thought about Ultima for several years when one day a friend showed me a game on his old 286 PC. It had nice graphics (For the pre-3D rendering world,) and a free world to mess with. You could kill and steal, or you could do quests and help people. You could talk to anyone and pretty much everyone had something to say. It took a little while to figure out that the game I was playing was a sequel to the Ultima games I had played on the NES years earlier.

Ultima VI graphically broke with the earlier Ultima games. It was still a top-down game, but it was no longer one-tile large stick figures wandering around. Also out was the first-person perspective in dungeons. The Avatar and his companions, and all NPCs in general now had distinct looks and even portraits to go along with their dialogue. Britannia was now a much more pretty place to look at and the game play gained a bit more depth. The world was more of a sandbox than it had been before and you were free to roam as you like.

The plot goes like this. Lord British regained control of his lands from Lord Blackthorn at the end of Ultima V and all was going well.Suddenly, a horde of red, demonic looking (They were actually refered to as daemons in previous games) gargoyles invaded Britannia from the underworld, taking over the eight shrines. The Avatar is lured through a red moongate and nearly sacrificed on an altar, only to be saved at the last minute by his old companions Iolo, Shamino and Dupre. After beating a hasty retreat and defeating several gargoyles who followed them though the moongate they escaped trhough, Lord British tasks the Avatar with fighting off the gargoyle invasion and to save Britannia. Again.

Sounds simple enough, but really, it isn't. Let me introduce you to the theme of this installment of the Ultima series: tolerance. The gargoyles are invading Britannia not out of some evil purpose, but because someone stole their most sacred artifact, the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom, from their homeland, the Underworld. In the process, they managed to destabilize set in motion the destruction of the gargoyles' underground home. Remember when I said raising the Codex wouldn't bite them in the ass? I lied.

As you travel the game, you learn that the gargoyles are an intelligent species simply trying to reclaim their stolen property and halt the destruction of their world. The Avatar is the False Prophet of their sacred prophecies who will destroy the gargoyles and must make a sacrifice for the gargoyles to survive. So what's an Avatar to do when his two options consist of die and let the gargoyles continue their invasion or commit genocide to save his adoptive world? I'm tempted to flat out say the solution, but it suffices to say he found a third option by which both sides could access the Codex and coexist peacefully.

The second three Ultima games are considered the Age of Enlightenment trilogy. The break with the cliched scifi/fantasy roots of Ultima I-III did much to turn Ultima from a basic RPG series into a classic series. Ultima IV especially breaks so many RPG conventions that it's easy to loose count. The closest the series comes to confronting a big bad end boss in the second trilogy is destroying the Shadowlords in Ultima V. And even then, you don't destroy them by sword and sorcery, but by solving a puzzle of learning their true identities and burning the shards that created them in a fire that represents the principle they oppose.

I'll stop this retrospective here and pick it up again in a second part before this goes too much longer. Join me next time when I review the best and the worst entries of the Ultima series.

Images courtesy of the internet.

The Legend of Zelda, or "Well excuse me... Wait. What do you mean that's an over-used catch phrase?"

A young boy wanders the monster-infested world in search of a magical MacGuffin to help fight a powerful evil lord in order to save a princess and the whole of the planet. Honestly, I think I just described about half the console RPGs in existence in one sentence. But in this case, we're talking about the grand daddy of the modern action-adventure dungeon crawler. The Legend of Zelda.

As a series, Zelda is about as prolific as they come. There has been at least one original release of the series on every major Nintendo console (Well, except the Virtual Boy, but we shall not speak of that demonic strainer of eyes. I suppose had it lasted longer, it may have gotten it's own Zelda title as well.) and countless re-releases over the years. There are also several spin offs, most of which have not seen a release in the United States, and three laughably abdominal games made for the ill-fated CD-i, but those are hardly worth mentioning. There was a Zelda animated series back in the '80s and the Zelda crew guest-stared on Captain N several times. There have been several comic series and countless Japanese manga about our green hero.

But for purposes of the review, let's narrow our focus and take a look at the original game. The Legend of Zelda was released in Japan for the Famicom Disk System - a Famicom peripheral that never came to the United States - in February 1986 and on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the U.S. in August 1987. Its shiny, gold cartridge sticks out among the sea of traditional gray NES cartridges. One of the more unique items included with the game was a map. On one side, there was a partially incomplete map of the over world, while on the other were a couple of dungeon maps and a list that gives you an idea of what treasures you'll find in the later dungeons. Both were invaluable for the beginning player in a world before one had hundreds of walk throughs a few keystrokes away on the Internet.

The game itself is a quintessential top-down adventure game. You control Link, a green Hylian elf with an improbably large inventory on a journey to collect the scattered pieces of the Triforce of Wisdom and ultimately liberate Princess Zelda from the clutches of the evil Ganon. As you travel the world and from dungeon to dungeon, you'll pick up links now-iconic equipment like the boomerang, bombs and bow and arrows. Some gear you'll find randomly strewn across the over world and the nine dungeons, while others can be purchased with rupees, the currency of Hyrule.

Game play is straight-forward. Link moves around wit the control pad, stabs his sword with the A button and uses his current special weapon with the B button. The Start button will bring up Link's inventory screen and the Select button pauses the game.

Link's life is measured in hearts and can be increased by picking up heart containers, most of which will drop off the dungeon bosses. You start the game with three hearts. At full life, Link's sword will shoot sword-shaped energy from a distance, giving him a useful sniping ability that will instantly go away the moment a random bat dares touch him. When Link is low on life, the game will start an incessant beeping noise that will grate on your nerves until a monster decides to drop a heart to restore some lost life. Link can also pick up faeries from fallen creatures that will restore a larger chunk of your life or visit a fairy spring which will restore his life to full. You can also pick up a red potion which will, when used, fully restore Link's life and are useful.

You're more or less free to roam where you like on the over world map with the only major limiting factors being that some areas require you to acquire certain items to unlock them. Well, that, and if you wander into some areas before you're supposed to, the monsters may be too strong to defeat with you puny starting sword. The dungeons can be entered in any order with the caveat that some dungeons are inaccessible without certain items and others can't be completed without certain items.

Aside from the monsters, there are also other Hylians hiding out across the world. Several are shopkeepers who'll sell you (mostly) valuable equipment. Others will offer advise of dubious value - not because they are trying to trick you or anything, but because the sparse dialogue in the game was so horribly translated. Still others may offer you some rupees or other items to assist you, while others will be angry that you busted into their homes and actually charge you for the repairs. Sadly, without a guide or notes from a previous playthrough, it's a bit of a crap shoot as to which is which.

The dungeons have a fairly stable formula to them. Find the map and compass, hunt down the special item, fight the boss, pick up the hunk of Triforce, rinse, repeat seven more times. While the early dungeons have more or less straight-forward layout, the later ones can be more tricky to navigate with multiple hidden rooms and secret passages.

Once link has traveled the world, collected enough items that he shouldn't be able to move any more or should at least require a cart to drag all his junk around in, and vanquished Ganon and saved the princess, your journey is not necessarily over. Why? Because the game will let you travel a harder version of the game with a new layout and stronger enemies and repeat the process over again.

The Legend of Zelda is a classic among gamers. It has been re-released in the U.S. for the Gameboy Advance, on the Game Cube as part of The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition, and is available on the Wii Virtual Console. Link is one of the most recognizable video game protagonists and the game has spawned 12 sequels (Counting the two Gameboy Color Oracle games as a single game and not counting LCD games, spin offs and the horrible CD-i games.) Granted, only one of the sequels - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link - is a direct sequel to the original. But most possess the basic elements of Link traveling the word to save the Princess Zelda (in one form or another) and defeat Ganon (also in one form or another.) If you can get past poorly translated text, The Legend of Zelda continues to be a quite enjoyable adventure and well worth playing for the four or five of you who have yet to do so.

Startropics, or "The one in which we explore how useful a yo-yo is as a weapon."

A boy - armed with a yo-yo - sets off on an island-hopping adventure to save his uncle from aliens. As goofy as a premise it may sound, it makes for an interesting game.

Startropics was an adventure game released for he Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989. It's one of the more memorable games of its time for both its good gameplay and its odd back story. It combines RPG elements with a core action-platforming game that sucks you in to the game.

You play Mike, a teenager from Seattle. After receiving a letter from his Uncle Steve, an archaeologist studying some ancient ruins in his laboratory in the south Pacific. When Mike arrives at C-Island, he learns from the local chief that Dr. J, as they call Mike's uncle, had been kidnapped and that monsters had begun to infest the local islands. Mike, in a fit of either bravery or insanity, takes it upon himself to venture out into the islands to find his uncle. The chief, in turn, decides to arm you with among the least probably video game weapons of all time, a yo-yo. We're dealing with a responsible bunch here, aren't we?

The over-world map and town maps work a lot like the basic RPG of the era works. You can talk to people, wander around and so on. The game really begins when you head into various tunnels and dungeons and it turns into a top-down action platformer. At the end of the first area, you pick up a yellow mini-sub named Sub-C is your mode of transportation as you visit the rest of the game's islands.

The topic of combat brings us to one of the more famous aspects of the game - your primary weapon. The yo-yo. It's, well, a yo-yo. It's a short-range weapon, unlimited use weapon with which you hit your enemies As the game goes forward, you'll pick up a couple upgrades to your yo-yo, but that will be quite a while in the game. I'm not entirely sure how effective a child's toy would be against slugs or rats or snakes, but in Startropics, fights them off quite well.

Aside from the yo-yo and its later upgrades, you'll be able to pick up various special weapons and items in each of the levels. Aside from the quest-relevant event items you'll pick up, there are two major categories of usable items. Support items, such as medicine, can be carried with you between levels, and weapons, which have a limited number of usages and vanish when you leave an area. Some of the temporary weapons are more useful than others and can kill enemies that would be difficult to yo-yo to death.

The levels are twisty, monster-filled tunnels. The ground is either open areas you can move around or tiles which can only be jumped on to. Tiles can contain switches that reveal paths that allow you to get items or continue to a previously blocked area.

At the end of most levels, you'll find a boss. Each one has its own gimmick. The bosses can be quite difficult to defeat and often it's not a matter of pummeling the boss into submission to overcome them. Many levels will have boss fights where you must do specific things to switches or other tiles in the room to win. Combined with the inability to attack in the air and the lack of diagonal movement, the the game can reach moments of controller-smashing frustration.

Overall, though, Startropics was a good game. It had a quirky aesthetic, a good sense of humor, and it was a fairly original plot for its time. In spite of its flaws, it's an enjoyable experience. The game is available on the Wii's Virtual Console and is worth a look if you haven't played the game before. Interestingly, Nintendo was forced to rename the yo-yo the "Island Star" for copyright reasons for the Virtual Console release. But we all know what Mike is really smacking those rats with, don't we?

Super Mario Bros. 3, or "How does a raccoon tail make Mario more aerodynamic?"

Some people love it. Some people... Love it? Face it. Super Mario Bros. 3 is a hard game not to like, assuming you're into 2D platform games. It is well-paced, takes you through a variety of environments, has a bunch of useful power-ups and doesn't fall all over itself to wedge in some sort of epic story.

The first time many gamers saw SMB3 was in the movie The Wizard. People far more talented than myself have already ripped that movie apart, but in short, it was a giant advertisement for Nintendo. Even a 10-year-old going to that movie saw it for what it was and didn't really care. All they cared about was the games.

In SMB3, you play as Mario... Or Luigi if you got stuck with the second controller. You're a plumber in a world full of walking fungi, anthropomorphic turtles and pipes scattered across the landscape for no adequately explored reasons.

King Koopa has sent his children to steal seven magic wands from seven kings of the various countries that apparently make up the Mushroom Kingdom. And for good measure, all the kings have been turned into animals. Where the Koopalings came from is anyone's guess. We may be better off not knowing who their mother was.

The heroes set off around the world, visiting the various themed lands of the Mushroom Kingdom. And after freeing the last king, you find out that, shock of shocks, Princess Toadstool has been kidnapped... Again. So the heroes head for Bowser's base of operations where you eventually face off with King Koopa and save the princess.

The levels in the game are accessed via a world map with various paths which all take you to your eventual goal of the level's castle. The map allows you to skip levels if you so desire as well as act somewhat strategically as to which path on the map will be open to you. Also, it gives you access to various special areas – some stationary and some which spawn either randomly or when certain conditions are met.

The selection of power-up items to help you on your way has greatly increased since the days of the original Super Mario Bros. You have your traditional mushrooms, fire flowers and stars. New to the game is the leaf, which lets Mario grow a raccoon tail, allowing Mario to fly if you get a running start. Don't ask me what about adding ears and a tail to a pudgy, Itallian plumber makes him aerodynamic enough to fly. Just go with it.

There are also three suits added to the game. The tanuki suit (Gives you all the powers of the racoon tail, plus lets you turn into an invincible statue for a few seconds,) the frog suit (Swim and hop,) and the hammer brothers suit (Lets you throw hammers at enemies, crouch down and be immune to fireballs, and just look like an all around bad ass.) One of the better changes to power ups is that you can also get them outside of the levels on the world map and store them up for when you'll need them. In fact, most of the suits are only found in large supply on the special bonus areas or mini games on the world map. There are also several power ups that effect the world map directly such as the hammer for breaking blocks on the world map. Last, but not least on the power up front, is the warp whistle. they allow you to bypass entire worlds.

The worlds Mario fights through are varied and fun. My personal favorite is Giant Land, where many of the enemies and obstacles are grown to huge proportions. Don't ask me why, but seeing Mario hop on top of Koopas that are four or five times his size is a few kinds of cool.

Aside from the normal level areas, the maps also have fortresses. Each one is controlled by a guy named Boom-Boom. He'll move around in predictable patterns and sometimes his arms turn into wings and he flies around. No, I don't know why he does that. I've always assumed that the Boom-Booms were some kind of creepy experiment Bowser set up gone horribly wrong. Or he's the Koopalings' "special" brother. Either way.

At the end of each of the first seven worlds, you board a Koopa brand airship and advance through a forced scrolling level which generally has no enemies present, but plenty of cannons and lifts. The ships look as though King Koopa's airship designers were really in to log cabins. Or Bowser bought out a few lumber yards before launching his conquest. At the end of each airship, you face off against one of the Koopalings - Bowser's offspring of indeterminate origin. They mostly employ unique attacks and attack patterns. But after you bonk them on the head 3 times, it's all over. The airship inexplicably disintegrates around you and you plummet to the ground, pilfered wand in hand.

In 2 player mode, Mario and Luigi alternate levels, leading to great fun when you can stick your friend with a level you hate. Also, it features the ability to play your friend in a version of the original Mario Bros. arcade game. Honestly, any time I tried to play someone else, we'd always end up ignoring the main game and try and screw each other over in the mini game.

SMB 3 has been ported to the Super Nintendo as part of the Super Mario All-Stars cart, to the Game Boy Advanced and is available on the Wii virtual console. Its worth tracking down if you're one of the five people who haven't played it before. And the rest of you? Go play it again. Really. I'll wait.

Welcome, or "I'm sure I'll get around to posting content eventually."

Welcome to my little blog... Thing.

To make a long story short, I've been playing video games most of my life. I know way to much about way too many of them and spent way too much time playing them over the years. So now, I'm going to write what will be entertaining and vaguely informative articles about those games.

What is there to differentiate myself from everybody else who beat me to the retro review punch? My take on games will be a whole lot less angry, I guess. I'll be sarcastic and rip games apart when they deserve it, but I'm not planning to be angry for the sake of being angry.

Why am I doing this? I have too much free time on my hands and a lot of stuff to say.

So welcome to Games of a Misspent Youth. Soon to feature actual content.